On The Power of Names

A conversation with little Nan

When you were a little girl, your name was Nancy Ellen. The name your parents gave you. You were named for a man you never knew, your grandfather Norman. You were given a name that started with the letter “N”–– Nancy. You found out later that Nancy means “grace.” You liked that, you still do. Norman’s Hebrew name was Nachum. Your Hebrew name was a feminized version, Nechama, which means comfort, but you didn’t know the meaning for years.

Your cousin was born 5 months before you, so she got Norma. You were always grateful that she came first. You were both named after a dead man, a tradition in Judaism, naming babies after dead relatives as a way of bestowing honor on their memory. You heard all of the stories about Norman. He died young. He was supposedly a great guy. Everyone loved him. But since you never got to meet him you never had the chance to decide for yourself.

The name never felt right to you. Nancy felt too girly. You knew for sure it didn’t fit you by the time you got to 2^nd grade and met your teacher, Mrs. Bloomrosen. She was the first person to call you “Nan.” That name, just a shortened version of the one you already had, sounded like home to you. It felt like warmth and love. Mrs. Bloomrosen never made big deal of it. She just called you Nan. It felt like your new name wrapped you up in a hug, a “squeeze the stuffing out of you” kind. Remember how happy you were? How seen? How loved?  Yes. You should’ve felt that way more often.

When you moved on to 3^rd grade, all of a sudden you were Nancy again. Your third grade teacher read your name off the roster when she took attendance. She didn’t know about the name you preferred. She called you Nancy when you raised your hand so enthusiastically, waving it back and forth, wanting to be called on because you KNEW the answers. Because knowing the answers made you feel worthy. You were smart, and you wanted to be loved for it. You wanted your other teachers to love you as much as Mrs. Bloomrosen had.

I want to share some wisdom I’ve gained over the years. This is important: Identify and ask for what you want and what you need. Think about Mrs. Bloomrosen. You knew that you loved when she called you Nan. When you moved on to 3^rd grade the name got left behind. You got left behind. You didn’t realize how important it was to you to hear that name when people spoke to you. You didn’t know you could ask people to call you Nan…and that’s not your fault.

You did what you needed to do to survive, to get by, to have some modicum of peace in the life you’d lived so far. You had troubles in 3^rd grade that made everything feel harder. An epilepsy diagnosis, and the bullying that followed. There were other kids who were tougher than you, at least on the outside. And they were mean. Maybe they were just afraid. But you had something on the inside that those others seemed to lack.

You were brave. You were much braver than you ever knew. You dealt with things other kids didn’t have a clue about, and you did it with grace, the meaning of your name. You never lost that grace. It’s such a deep part of who you are. You were kind. You were kind to others who reminded you of yourself. Who had something different about them, that made them stand out, made them a target for other people’s derision and cruelty.

From the time you were very young, you knew compassion. You knew care. Maybe you came by it innately? It’s possible. You also came by those qualities by experiencing loss, by knowing pain, shame, and exclusion at a young age. But you knew love, too. You got love from your parents, your grandmother Meme, family friends, and some of your wonderful teachers. There were people you did feel safe with. They were the keepers. You’ve always been smart about finding the keepers. They’re few and far between, but you found them and held them close. You still do. That’s a gift. You still have relationships with people who’ve known you since childhood.

Sometimes you’d latch on to people you thought were keepers, until they disappointed you or hurt you deeply, and you’d try to talk yourself into keeping them anyway. You’d second and third guess the red flags, looking inward and laying the blame on yourself for things that turned out badly. You didn’t trust yourself enough. You weren’t able to discern. Not yet.

As you got older, you started to build inner armor. You didn’t know about healthy boundaries yet, so you walled yourself in, and dug yourself a moat. You wanted to protect your heart. You learned to hide––you still do it sometimes––it’s rote behavior. Your default. You didn’t understand that you were choosing to isolate. You took yourself away.

In your mind, the fact that you spent so much time alone was because of others. They were doing it to you. You couldn’t see that you were running for cover to try to keep yourself safe. Hiding was a coping mechanism. I’m here to tell you that it’s perfectly okay that you made that choice. It was how you knew to keep yourself out of harm’s way. Even though it might not have served you as well as you got older, you still did it. Old habits can be hard to break.

Eventually you began to value yourself, to trust your instincts. To listen closely. To observe. Over the years you learned discernment and moved on to healthier people and situations. You started to come out to play.

At 15, you signed up to do a self-awareness training. The 1970s were a trippy time. All the hip people were doing these kinds of workshops. They were discovering their “true” selves. Your parents, and their friends. They appeared to be so happy, so high, and they said they were transformed. You didn’t know what that meant. They seemed to be speaking in code, jargon with no key. You wanted to be let in on the secret.

At the top of the application form you had to fill out for the training there was a question that stopped you. That was when you experienced your first transformation. That first huzzah! It was a question no one had ever asked you before: “Name you like to be called __________” Wow! You already knew it. You filled that space in with three uppercase letters (at the time you always wrote in all caps because it was your personal style), N-A-N.

After that you started demanding (in a polite way, of course) that everyone call you Nan. That was a step towards self-esteem, self-love, self-care. Some people resisted, not because they didn’t care about your request, but because they were trained. Nancy was embedded in their brains, from years of repetition and association. Most of them tried and succeeded in making the switch, but even now, all these many, many, many years later they slip sometimes. You don’t take offense like you used to. You’re more generous now. You know it’s not a terrible infraction. You can hear the love that comes with it. It’s not only about your name.  

Then when you were in your 50s you had your name changed legally. No more Nancy…just Nan. You left your middle name behind. But your Hebrew name was not erased. You kept it. Because of what it meant: comfort. Such blessings in that name. The day the judge signed off on your paperwork felt like a day of freedom, of celebration. A day of remembering Mrs. Bloomrosen, and how your name was born. She named you with love. A nickname that stuck. She had no idea how much it meant to you. To be taken under her wing, given a special name. A name that felt like love. A name that felt like home. The name that we wear now. A name that feels like grace.

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