What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
You know when you’re in middle school, and everyone plays the “guess my middle name” game? Mine starts with a P, which always threw people off. I didn’t have a typical middle name like Mary or Beth. (Usually guessing my middle name took longer than anyone else.)
My middle name is Patricia. It’s uncommon, but a nice name. I’m named after my Great Aunt Patty. I wish I knew more about her. She was one of those relatives I’d see at family gatherings, the kind who’d tell me how big I’d gotten and remind me I was just a baby the last time she saw me. (I have an extremely big family.) I don’t know much about her, but my mom was close with her, and that connection always made the name feel special.
Now that I have a child of my own, choosing her name was one of the hardest decisions we made. We had lists for days, and honestly, we didn’t settle on her name until we were heading to the hospital. Since we didn’t know the baby’s gender, we had both a boy and a girl name ready to go.
It was important to me that the middle name flowed with the first name and honored someone meaningful to us. If we’d had a boy, my husband wanted the middle name to be Gideon — his first name — to follow tradition. But if it was a girl, I knew I wanted her middle name to be a tribute to one of my favorite people in the world: my Mom.
My mom shaped me into who I am today. She taught me perseverance, how to find the positive in every situation, and that all people deserve love. (“They put their pants on the same way as you and me,” she’d always say.) Her name is Yvonne, but we felt it was a little long and didn’t flow quite how we wanted. So, we settled on Eve.
It was perfect — a simple, beautiful name with so much meaning. And it became even more special when my mom helped deliver my perfect child into the world.