Roses and other things with names

I was listening to the radio this morning on the way home from running. One deejay was relating his major faux pax (only recently discovered) of calling a nominal acquaintance by the wrong name for a year and a half. A caller instructed him to apologize IMMEDIATELY that there is nothing more important than a name and he had breached that. Okay, maybe a little intense.

But names are very interesting and they do have power. I have loved as my children learn to say and then spell their own names. CE learned early on that her name started with C (a name commonly spelled with an S). When teachers or other adults would write her name for her and misspell it, she refused to accept whatever item carried the misspelled name. If there was an S, it was NOT her, end of story.

A few months before CW was born, a new family in our ward had a baby boy with the same name. They are so close in age and have enjoyed best buddy status. They always refer to each other by first and last name, to avoid confusion, I guess. They run their names into one very quickly articulated name, often difficult for new people to understand what is being said.

Bam has been my only kid who heavily identifies with his WHOLE name--first, middle and last. He was asking a buddy what his middle name was and the buddy looked very puzzled. I'm sure he has a middle name, but I don't think he really knows what it is yet. And Bam could not understand how that was possible.

I'm the Sunday School teacher at church and we've been talking about the Old Testament: where Abram becomes Abraham, Sarai becomes Sarah, and where Jacob becomes Israel and names places and builds a lot of rock towers. (that's as far as we've gotten) In traditional American culture, when women marry, we take our husband's last name. I was in law school when I got married and I had a professor/boss who had married later in life and kept her name--as it was the name under which she had built her career. She advised me that it had been the easier choice at the time but infinitely more difficult ever after, as they had a child together and as it was confusing and requiring of explanations every time she went somewhere, took her child out of school, etc etc. I just added my new last name onto the end, since I never had a middle name before, now I do. It never occurred to me to worry over this decision, but I didn't have a body of professional work tied to my first name. And over the years, it has seemed to me that becoming a wife and mother is such an identity change, an expansion of self that a new name seems fitting to commemorate the newness of this life that I have now. Perhaps that's why the Lord went about changing names in the Old Testament, to commemorate the vast changes of the lives of these prophets (well, Sarah wasn't the prophet, but boy howdy, a post menopausal child is definitely a CHANGE), to allude to them and those around them that NOTHING would be the same because of covenants made and paths taken/not taken.

While my name alludes to my marital status, I am the one that has to remind me of covenants I have made and paths taken. I know that the choices I make change me and my future in ways as complete as a name change is, though one not requiring a visit to the Social Security office. I want that. I want those decisions to change my heart in such ways that though my name may be the same, nothing else about me will be. I want to be as proud of those changes as CE was of the spelling of her name, as clear as CW was on who he was in relation to his buddy and as completely embracing of all that my covenants have made me that I don't want to leave anything out, like Bam and his whole name.