Comments on: What Does My Name Mean ?

By: will jones

will jones — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 07:08:25 +0000

If you want to use a urbandictionary-like site to find the meanings of names i would recommend What does my name mean? Basically there is a whole list of tens of thousands of names and people write and vote meanings.

By: donna

donna — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 10:42:47 +0000

its also hard to bond with someone when you’re face blind, object blind, context blind, meaning deaf and can’t easily process your own body. My father got around that through music, rhythms, movement, talking via objects, gestural signing, singing. My mother went down conventional routes – blah and ‘look’ which don’t work with meaning deafness and meaning blindness. When I was about 9-11 she really seemed to ‘get it’ but by then it was too late in the bonding department. So I think the situation needs to be seen in that context.

I think re the doll thing, there was something missing in her own bonding department. Her mother had been 14 when she had the first child, 16 when she had my mother and followed that with 7 more all in ignorance, violence, alcoholism, abuse and poverty. She if her only idea of connecting to a female was to own a doll, it’s really got to be seen in context. I don’t see her as socially-emotionally developed. Intelligent but in my view socially-emotionally stuck at around age 9-11.

People forget that the tragedy was not just my own situation but what my parents brought to the table. But, for all of that, they remain the most innovative, crazy experimenters and hat’s off to them because they had no books, films, anything to go on and they really did some wild things that worked.

By: Bronwyn G

Bronwyn G — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 08:41:42 +0000

Thanks for explaining this. Especially that it wasn't that she wasn't worth calling anything. And then you talked about fathers 'in the sentiment sense' in the big letter you wrote to him in Like Colour to the Blind. It was good that you dared to say the word. And in the part where you talked about your mother abusing you in the first pages of Nobody Nowhere, you said: Even battered children form attachments with such a mother. I never did. Also there was a bit in Somebody Somewhere about: I was relentlessly independent and controlling, so I didn't suffer so much for [something, or a lack of something]. And there's the possibility that she was addicted to owning and possessing you in particular, in a way she never was to the boys.

By: donna

donna — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 07:12:03 +0000

after the ‘mother’ showdown, I’d refer to her in the third person (to my father) by her name. Later, as an adult, when absolutely necessary to call her something, I have a few times called her by her name. But generally, I found it very difficult to call her anything. It wasn’t that she wasn’t worth calling anything (I feel she often took it personally) I think it was mostly that I could feel she really needed to prove to others that I had a connection with her so something on a gut level was self protective about being ‘owned’ or ‘displayed’, so calling her nothing was more about Selective Mutism than it was about ‘having an attitude’. But I think Reactive Attachment Disorder threw it’s penny worth in too. But I only called my father Jackie Paper (from the song Puff The Magic Dragon) and only as an adult did I call him Jack and only once did I call him Dad, when he had two weeks to live and I so wanted to dare to say the word.

By: Bronwyn G

Bronwyn G — Wed, 27 Jan 2010 01:31:20 +0000

And Marnie sounds different again from Tracey or Kate. Those must have been names ‘everyone’ was called in the 1960s and 1970s.

And didn’t you call your mother by her first name?