Hard Truth

living with a hard g and other truths

I raised my hand, trying to see above the heads in front of me. The man with the guitar beckoned me to come forward. I climbed up the stairs to stand at the end of a row of children on the edge of the stage. The folksinger sang each child a little song with their name in the lyrics, then sent the child back to their seat. While I waited for my turn, I pulled up my socks, fixed the barrette in my hair, and had time to think. As he sang each song, he didn’t say any names wrong. Their names were easy, not hard like mine. Finally, my turn! My heart raced. Propped on his stool, he leaned low and asked me for my name. I took a deep breath and decided, if only for this one moment, I would create a different identity. I looked away from my parents in the audience and up at him. “Jane,” I breathed out.

Then the man sang a song for me with my new name and I smiled all the way back to my seat.

Our family walked down a path in the sunshine, all jovial and high spirits, my mother pushing my baby sister in her stroller. An audience member paused near my parents to say how adorable their daughter Jane is. My parents laughed and exclaimed, “That’s not her name!”

“Jane”

My father gave me my name, after his grandmother, my great-grandmother. I never met her or my father’s parents. My father ran away from home when he was 16, and did what I did up on that stage all those years later. He changed his name. He went from growing up as a Weisfeld to becoming a Landor, and never looked back, as far as I know. At least, he never talked about his parents to me. His father came from Russia, but my father barely spoke about his maternal side. He must have had lingering love for his maternal grandmother, and she was either German, or had German roots because of the pronunciation of my name. I’ve been to Germany a number of times. No one mispronounces my name there.

All my life—61 years—I’ve had to correct people on the pronunciation of my name. It was embarrassing when I was little, especially in school. That substitute teacher in seventh grade health class? When the tension of having to discuss genitalia was as tight as a blown up condom? She took a roll call from a list of names and rhymed my name with a body part. Yeah, that time. ( I’m not talking about my pinkie here.) It did release some tension and everyone burst out laughing.

No one seemed to have heard of the pronunciation of my name before. When I was eight, a friend’s father said, “What kinda name is that? It sounds like a kind a salami.” Thanks for that image, friend’s dad! Now, when people struggle with it, pronounce it like the character Regina George in the movie “Mean Girls,” or a Canadian city, I tell them it’s pronounced with a hard g. But that only confuses some people.

There’s no worse sound to me than someone pronouncing the second syllable of my name with a hard g but a long i, as in lie. Or worse, as I’ve said, a soft g and a long i, rhyming Regina with vagina. Come on, people. What if I spelled it with double es, so that the sound in the middle would be a long e, as in sleep, like it’s supposed to be? But then there’s still the issue of the g. Look, if I told you my name ended in an i, it would rhyme with lamborghini. Simple. Regini.

For 30 years my family has called me Gigi (hard gs, if that makes sense). My niece couldn’t say my name when she was little and that’s what she called me and it stuck.

I’ve had other nicknames, like Reggie (soft gs). I’ve been called Red (the hair). My favorite nickname was given to me when I was a secretary at a small architecture firm when I was getting my MA in Annapolis, Maryland. I told the team my name means queen in Latin, and that stuck, too. They were a fun crowd. The owner held an annual crab boil in his back yard. When I left the firm at the end of the summer, they designed a board for me with bottlecaps glued on spelling out the name they gave me, “Queenie.”

It always, always surprises me when I tell people my name and later on in the conversation they repeat it correctly. They have an ear. Because usually the opposite happens. I’ve grown more confident over the years about correcting, but some people will still mispronounce. Now and then people will tell me it’s a beautiful name, and I wonder what it is they hear that rings true for them.

I once stood in line at a coffee shop and gave the man my name and he wrote it down on the cup then he said, “That’s funny. The woman before you has the same name.” That was a first. Of course, she pronounced it with a soft g. (Regina George again. All soft gs.)

From the get-go we’re handed an external identity we have no control over. Our name is inseparable from who we are. How much does our name—or any external—shape our identity, who we are, who we evolve into?

My father partly changed his identity when he changed his last name, separating himself from his Jewish identity (which he later regretted). This makes me wonder about how much of our identity we can change if we want. As we age, do our personalities merely sharpen? Will my temperament become more incensed by minor things? Will I be forever cantankerous? Or will I evolve into a calmer version of myself?

Therapy aside, how do we consciously evolve anyway? It’s possible our evolution—over a span of eight, nine, ten decades or so—happens unconsciously. But what if we choose to evolve intentionally?

My response to other’s reaction to my name has evolved over time from embarrassment, frustration, not giving a damn what people call me, anger, pride, to confidence in correcting, like my response to my name has paralleled the evolution of my personality. It’s hard to say if any of that has been intentional or not.

I’m past the age where I need externals like money, status, recognition to feel that’s what will cause me to grow. It’s something internal, but what? Sometimes I still feel like I’m little Jane, standing on the edge of a stage, asserting my independence while still trying to figure it out. Maybe that never goes away, wondering who we are, if we’re evolving in the way we’ve imagined we would. I’m not sorry I didn’t change my name later in life. I don’t love my name, but I’ve grown into it. Maybe evolution means embracing what we have, while continuing to look for more.

Maybe it has to do with the couple my husband Billy and I sat next to at a restaurant during a recent trip to Santa Fe, New Mexico. Our two-tops were close to theirs and as we sat down, the man and I met each other’s eyes. I may have spoken first, I can’t remember what I said, but I could see he was open. As their food arrived, as Billy and I shared guacamole and chicken tostadas, we learned about their lives and they asked about ours. They came from the Netherlands. They’d lived in New Mexico since they were in their twenties. He worked on a reservation as a dentist, and still runs into former patients in town. Billy pointed to his mouth and the man picked up his fork and made a gesture like he was going to examine his tooth. We laughed. They have many grandchildren. Mid-conversation, their daughter called to see how they were doing, the volume on his phone turned way up, the concern in her voice reaching us across the tables.

Now in their nineties, he’s been retired for 25 years, and it seems they’ve built a life around making connections. Maybe that’s how they’ve evolved. Not only with the externals but via their curiosity and empathy for others. After they signed their check the man said, “If you want to look us up when you come back, ask around for the dentist from Holland. You’ll find us.”

Maybe that’s the answer. Stay humble. Look others in the eye. Be curious about what you see there.

We shook hands when they stood up to leave. We exchanged names. The woman from Holland smiled brightly at me and said, “What a beautiful name.”

Evolving