In 1909 a redheaded baby girl was born in Kentucky. She loved to bake and she loved to sing, and she grew up to have four boys. At each birth her husband said, "Now this one's a little redheaded girl for Mama." He was wrong every time.
The third of those four boys grew up and got married, and in 1970 he and his wife had a redheaded baby girl. (That was me.) I love to bake (my grandmother taught me how) and I love to sing, and I wondered all through my fourth son's gestation if I would have four boys like my grandmother.
I thought that if I had a daughter, I might name her in honor of my grandmother, who waited and waited for a little girl. I didn't want to name her after my grandmother, exactly, because the girls' names from that family are not tearing up the SSA charts here in the 21st century. (Two of her sisters, for instance, were named Lorenza and Melvie.) It occurred to me, though, that I was very partial to a girl's name that was a near-anagram of my grandmother's name. And my husband liked it too, which was unusual. (Our conversations about names go like this: [me] What about x? [him] No. What about y? [me] No. What about z? [him] No. Etc.)
There are two meanings attributed to the name we liked. One, as I mentioned, is "shining light"; the other is "mercy." Now this is a little odd, because for years I said I'd like to name a child something that meant light or something that meant mercy. I lobbied my husband to name a boy "Foster," which is a transliteration of the Greek word for "light-bearers" used in Philippians 2:15. (He said no.) How surprising, then, to find both meanings connected to this one name: our daughter's name.
In our discussions of girls' names over the years, my husband's grandmother's name surfaced over and over again. She was a Polish woman from Milwaukee, hard-working and resourceful. I did not meet her until after Alzheimer's had taken a heavy toll, but I could still see glimpses of the kind of person she must have been, reflected in the way her family loved her. Her name also has a Marian connection, which was important to us. So that's our baby's middle name.
About the first 20 times I said her full name to someone, I teared up a little bit. (In the Vital Records office, for instance.) It means a lot to me -- it says something about where she comes from and where I hope she is going. I have decided that her nom du blog is going to be Stella, another pretty old-fashioned name with the same echo of Phil. 2:15. Even though I prefer to keep my kids' real names off the blog, I wanted to tell you how we chose this one. I wish her great-grandmothers could have known her. But I'll make sure she knows about them.
Recent Comments