That's what a friend of mine said to me in college when I was grousing that my parents had named me after my father's mother. At that time in my life, I did a lot of grousing, and the friend did a lot of patient listening and suffered a great deal.
It was after only a few months in first grade that I realized that NOBODY had my name. The only people I had ever heard of who were named Lena were my grandmother and Lena Horne, who were also the people after whom my parents gave me my first name. My nuclear, (in every sense of the word), family lived in rural Vermont for the first 12 1/2 years of my life; most, if not all, of my classmates were as likely to have heard of my paternal grandmother, who was never in Vermont in her life and died in Philadelphia when my father was 10, as they were to have heard of Lena Horne.
With the instinct of young children in the first stages of formal socialization, I knew that the survival rate for weird people was nil, and that having a first name that nobody had and that nobody had ever heard of meant that I was weird. I started a notebook to write lists of normal, female names that I wanted my parents to call me; I had at least one for every day of the week. It didn't occur to me that changing your name every day is not a normal thing to do unless you're a felon. My parents didn't argue with me, they just called me Lena.
I got used to my name and like it. That's fortunate because I spend a lot of time saying and spelling it for other people, who frequently sound like this:
"Lisa?"
"Leah?"
"Nina?"
"Tina?"
"How do you spell it?"
"L-i-I'm sorry, so it's L-e-a-n-no? Just L-e-n-a. Lena. And your last name is? So that's C-o-a-I'm sorry, it's K-o-h-you pronounce it Coachmen? I'm sorry, how do you pronounce it? Thank you, I'm sorry about that. And that starts with a C? With a K. And that's K-o-c-h-m-a-n. Is that right?"
I think that psychology is important, that mental health and the study of what causes mental health and what destroys it are important. The process of what you think and how you think it is what leads you to make every decision. I do think it's unfortunate that there are many people who use generally known and misunderstood theories of why people are who they are to blame everything that they or others don't like on how they grew up, what their parents were like, or anything and everything from the past. Having perspective on what your past life was like is a first step to figuring out what you want the rest of your life to be like; it's not an all-purpose excuse for being a flake or a jerk or for hating people. I would have had a much less traumatic childhood if my parents had been less obsessed with their own traumatic childhoods and their subsequent disappointment with each other. A child doesn't know that her parents' lives don't feel right to her parents: she's happy and feels safe when they're happy and she's sad and scared when they're sad and angry.
"I thought that Lena was a beautiful name," my mother said, when my parents and I finally, once, got around to talking about why I was named after my paternal grandmother. That was the last reason that she gave, the others being about family and tradition. It is a beautiful name; having an ugly first name is not the reason that my father's mother killed herself.
"I think what happened to her was that she was always taking care of others, and when she needed help, there was nobody to help her." That's what someone who had known my grandmother since childhood told me about my grandmother's death. I don't think that people necessarily deprive those who need support out of dislike or coldness; I think that when catastrophe takes over someone's life, the people around that person often don't know what to do any more than the stricken person does.
The day that my friend quietly reminded me that my parents had named me for my grandmother out of love was the day that I stopped complaining about my name, which I had only learned to hate again after I was hospitalized for the first time in my late teens and heard it pronounced with the wheedling tone of contempt and dangerous malice peculiar to many people who work in mental health care. It would be several years from that day before I understood that what people think of you is sometimes an ego boost, often an obstacle, and rarely the truth.
Copyright L. Kochman, May 3, 2015 @ 2:35 p.m.
