What Does My Name Mean ?
When my mother was pregnant she was reading the Spanish dictionary. She was a ‘boy mother’, that kind that gets along with boys, can relate to them. If I was a boy, I understand I’d have been named Stewart , meaning ‘steward’, someone who is the caretaker. But I was a girl, so, utilising the dictionary, I was called Donna, meaning ‘female’. It’s interesting how we might be expected to live up to our names and what they conjure up. But I struggled with my name. It seemed random, as if my name might as well have been Ichabod, or Ludo. So by the age of two I had become Willie and by four I had become Carol. At thirteen I announced my name was Lee. When nobody called me Lee, I decided I was Marnie. Nobody called me that either.
Around the age of ten I was still whispering my name at the mirror and trying to feel something, still perplexed as to how any human could connect with a name, answer to it, identify with it. It was just sounds. Mine, Donna, sounded sort of rolly, it was sort of hilly, a bit on the soft side, not like Tracey or Kate. So when I was still unable to respond to my name my mother finally declared war. She won. I learned that there was a very high price to pay for not responding to that random set of sounds. I began to tune into them. She insisted that I used her name too, Mum. Boy was that painful. I had torrents of involuntary speech but getting me to linguistically draw on conformity and volition to address someone directly by name in the first person, and a title no less which linked them with autonomous Moi, BLASPHEMY! But again, she was ‘persuasive’ to say the least. I can say PTSD is a good teacher. I managed to say ‘mother’ and she had her triumph. To me, I’d won. ‘Mother’ was a category, not a name. I had given her a noun but not a proper noun. Don’t know I’d be here to tell the tale had she twigged.
Donna Williams, Dip Ed, BA Hons.
Author, artist, singer-songwriter, screenwriter.
Autism consultant and public speaker.
http://www.myspace.com/nobodynowherethefilm
http://www.donnawilliams.net
http://www.aspinauts.com
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.