What's in a name? Shakespeare was very clever with words, but it is an inescapable fact of life
that names imbue people, places, and things with a certain je ne sais quoi (pardon
my French). He must have known so. After all, his ladies have such fabulous monikers: Portia, Ophelia, Desdemona, Hippolyta, et al. Recently, we had trial ownership of a dog over a long weekend.
The dog's original owner had designated her Maddie, and while we considered keeping
the dog, there was no way we were keeping the name. We know several
children with variations of that name, and besides, if we were going to
walk her, feed her, and care for her, we were going to name her. So, for the few days she was with us, before allergies and our children's innate disobedience sent Maddie back whence she had come, I tried out a number of potential appellations.
In doing so, I
realized that each made her look like a different dog, at least in my eyes. Emily Dickenson, Edie for short, was perky and comfortable, loved long walks, and was smart but not intimidating. Dorothy Parker, on the other hand, was intriguing but a little worse for wear, as though the afternoons were a bit too long. I think I loved her best as Capucine, after the famous French fashion model best known for
playing Peter Sellers's wife in The Pink Panther. Capucine the dog was elegant and mysterious; her coat seemed a little shinier, her ears more regal. And
that's just a dog, an animal that is non-verbal and is unlikely ever to have a curriculum vitae to worry about. With people, the issue is so much more loaded. All this to say that I know how it sounds: We move to Europe, and before you know it we have changed the spelling of our daughter's name from Violet to Violette. The Snobs, you must be thinking, the Carpetbaggers, the Yuppity-Ups. I don't blame you. I would probably think the same. But it's not quite as it seems. (Is it ever?)
Let's go back to The Night It All Began, in that hospital delivery room perched high above FDR Drive. In the minute of new parent enchantment between the torture of delivery and the terror of all that went wrong afterward, Steve, his eyes wet as he gazed upon that magnificent, moon-faced, howling purple infant, said, "Maybe we should call her Violet(te)."
Then some other stuff happened that I won't go into just now. My sister took the baby, the room filled up with doctors, and I was wheeled into an operating room. All that night alone in recovery, and the next morning as I waited for my husband to be released from the psych ward and my baby to be cleared by the neonatal ICU, the thought running 'round and 'round in my mind was, "I need to see my little Violet(te)." By the time we were finally together as a family, sometime around noon, she had a name.
But did her name have a spelling? Well. The great-grandmother who was partial originator of the name, as far as our baby name list was concerned, was Violet. I, being an amateur Francophone, while respecting the traditional British spelling, couldn't easily get past the fact that in French, violet is the masculine form of the word, and violette, the feminine. Violette just looked prettier to me, and could be pronounced either way. Ah, but we had both spent our entire lives spelling our own names for strangers, we said, pen hovering over the blank line on the birth certificate. Did we want to curse our daughter with the same fate? Everyone, most English-speakers, anyway, would know how to spell Violet by sound. Violette would require constant verbal correction of schoolteachers and receptionists, and the ladies at the DMV. Pragmatism got the better of us, and we quickly wrote V-I-O-L-E-T on the page, handing it to a nurse before we could change our minds.
Over the next few years, I had moments of doubt, but none serious. Actually, most of my doubts had more to do with our not having given her my last name in addition to Steve's, again done out of pragmatism. I spoke French with Violet at home quite a lot, and when I did she was always Violette, but the spelling didn't seem to matter either way. When she learned to write her name, she learned it both ways, because she asked to. Two years later, school application time arrived--which in New York is something akin to writing and defending a doctoral thesis (or so I have heard from friends who have done both)--and for various reasons, Violet was enrolled at a French school. There she officially became Violette. She loved school, made friends, and started to get comfortable with the bilingual program, but we noticed with concern that she began to differentiate between when she was as Violet, and when Violette.
Then we moved to Holland. A transfer into another French school was easy--the curriculum is consistent throughout the French system--but a move is always a bit emotional, and a new school in a new country, neither of which speaks the family's native language, is a lot of change. Violet(te) transitioned remarkably well for an almost-six-year-old, but the name differentiation became worse, and we worried that we were creating a situation in which she might believe she is a different person "out there" than she is "in here". We made a decision, undertook an experiment. Her name would be spelled Violette all the time, regardless of the pronunciation. No paperwork has been filed or changed, no official pronouncement made to family and friends. She is six, so her personal correspondents are few, mostly grandmothers, and she is rarely saddled with the task of completing legal forms. We figure we have a little time to test our hypothesis. In the long term, this change could be brilliant...or meaningless, or possibly misguided. That is parenthood. Things could also be back to the way they were before you read this post. That, too, is parenthood.
She is quite a Violet(te), though, no matter the spelling of her name, and she just lost her first tooth! (She added the exclamation point as she copy-edited my original draft.) Adolescence is just around the corner.
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