Invisible Girl

Invisible Girl

           LaDonna quickly found a miniature car tag for each of her children: Matthew, Diane, Michael, and Barbara. This was why she had given them such uncomplicated names. She paid for her purchases and left the shop.

           When LaDonna was a child, there was never anything with her name on it. Magnets, mugs, tee shirts, little car tags, keyrings – millions of small touristy items with hundreds of kids’ names on them – but never her name. Not once. Plenty of things that said “Donna,” but her name wasn’t “Donna”, though her third-grade teacher had insisted on calling her that all year.

           And they moved to a small Southern town in fourth grade, which meant that: 1. They would never b”e from there” no matter how long they lived there. 2. Having a weird name added to your outsider status. Unless, of course, you were born there and named after your grandfather whose name was Brick. No joke. There was a kid named Brick. And another named Fern.

           When her family had vacationed, they’d always stop by some local store with a restaurant in the back and a trinket shop in the front. Always, always, there were items for her sister, Heather, and her brother, Jack. Never anything with “LaDonna” printed on it. Or even her middle name, Nicolette, which was worse. Oh, her parents always bought her something, and it usually cost more than the printed trinkets Jack and Heather got, but that was not the point. She was a nonperson to the people who put names on things. She was an invisible girl.

           Coupled with being the only introvert in the family, it affected her whole childhood. Both invisible and silent. Some people didn’t even realize there were three children in the family.

           When she was eleven years old, she told her mom how hurt she was by her name, how uncomfortable it made her, and begged her to have it changed. Her mother only scoffed and said, “You have an absolutely beautiful name, and someday you will come to appreciate it. My mother named me Mary Ann, the most common, horrible name ever, and I made sure my children had nice names. And what does it matter anyway? A name is just a name. Why all the drama?” LaDonna never mentioned it again. She suffered in silence all the way through high school, lonely, invisible, and silent.

           Then she went to college, out of town and on her own. By the end of freshman year, she was friends with Ophelia, Laquita, and Deonte, with Margarite and Sullivan (nickname Sully) and Forrest. No one blinked twice at her name, and she blossomed. She became a real person. Maybe all the outliers from childhood had formed their own little clique. Whatever, she was comfortable with her name for the first time in her life. Maybe even a little bit proud of it.

           When she and Sullivan began dating, her first real boyfriend, it seemed life couldn’t get better. She was majoring in Creative Writing, her lifelong passion, and falling in love with a great guy. She was in her element.

           During senior year, things began to get serious between her and Sullivan, and a wedding followed the summer after graduation.

           Her life was blissed. Blessed and blissed.

           She went on and got her MFA while Sully worked at his father’s shoe store, and before too long they began to think about starting a family. They’d both agreed to have children “someday,” and it seemed the time had come.

Their first major disagreement had also come.

           Sully, it seemed, liked his cumbersome family name, Winston Sullivan Throckmore, and he liked the idea of a Winston Sullivan Throckmore, Jr. LaDonna was appalled. Apparently, Sully’s childhood had not been traumatized by his parents’ choice of his moniker, as hers had. But then, he had grown up in the city; maybe that was the difference.

           They didn’t actually argue about it; they mostly just didn’t talk about it. But when the two little pink lines showed up, they knew it was time to make a decision.

           They came to a compromise. Each of their children would have an ordinary first name, which they would be called, and a less ordinary middle name. Sully graciously forfeited the Junior idea. “Throckmore” seemed pretty cumbersome, too, but nothing to do about that.

           So over the next eight years, they welcomed Matthew Winston, Diane Gabriella, Michael Sullivan, and Barbara Vivienne Throckmore. Could life get any better? LaDonna couldn’t imagine how.

           They made a nice living; Sully had opened a chain of shoe stores which were doing quite well, and LaDonna had penned and published a highly successful series of YA novels. They had the money to vacation often and well. And LaDonna always, always, bought her children touristy items with their names on them. It was one of the things that gave her great pleasure. Matthew, Diane, Michael, and Barbara. There were thousands of cool items with those names on them. And her kids pretty much had all of them. Somehow, it proved to her what a good mom she was.

           One day, though, when Diane was eleven years old, she came to LaDonna and told her how much she hated her name. There were seven Dianes in her school, three of them in her grade, and she felt like she was just one of a crowd, and not even a separate person, and she felt invisible. Why hadn’t her mom given her a beautiful name like LaDonna, or at least called her by her middle name, Gabriella?

           LaDonna didn’t know what to say, but she knew what not to say. She knew not to say what was said to her. After she’d collected herself, she told her daughter exactly why she had been named as she had. She told her about the pain of having an unusual name, how people made her repeat it when they met her, how some kids made fun of it, about how there were never any souvenirs with her name on them, how she had felt invisible. And how she didn’t want her children to have the same experience.

           “Oh, all those little keyrings and magnets and stuff? That stuff is stupid,” her daughter said. “And it can be dangerous. I read about a little kid who was kidnapped because the guy called him by his name so he thought his parents knew the guy, but he just had on a tee shirt with his name on it. And can I start going by Gabriella instead?”

           LaDonna had to laugh. She hugged her daughter and said, “Yes, my darling Gabriella.”

           What did it matter, anyway? A name was, after all, just a name. Why all the drama?