“Kiss a lover,
Dance a measure,
Find your name
And buried treasure.Face your life,
It’s pain,
It’s pleasure,
Leave no path untaken.”
A few times during our Paris vacation, Sweeney and I found ourselves sitting at a kitchen table, taking notes on a bunch of creative ideas, goals and aspirations. It was during one of these sessions, as I talked about book blogging and fiction writing and I don’t know what else that she casually mentioned blogging under my own name. My real name.
I can’t say that I’d never considered that. Of course I had. And though I’ve outgrown the need for a pseudonym, there was still some residual fear over letting it go. Sure, I use photos of myself on the Internet and befriend people on my Facebook and post links to my Instagram, but Lorraine had become a sort of security blanket. There was still the feeling of hiding in plain sight which was nice to have when communication or self reflection got scary.
Sitting there, in our temporary Parisian apartment, I asked Sweeney how I could possibly just stop being Lorraine. She looked at me very seriously and with all her feelings of friendship toward me (at least, that’s how I’m imagining it) told me a thing I probably needed to hear: It’s not that big of a deal.
Perhaps no one else cared about me losing my security blanket. Perhaps it was very easy to stop using a name that was never mine.
Instead, I would introduce myself to the blogging world again, five years after our first meeting.
Hello. My name is Marines.
My mother named me for my two grandmothers, Maria and Ines. She combined the names (hey, maybe that’s why I love making up my own words…) without realizing that a branch of the United States armed forces had beat her to the spelling.
(I just confirmed with her that she truly didn’t know. She patted me on the shoulder and said not to worry about it though because kids these days are named Brooklyn and North and Blue.)
Probably the first time I realized something was different about my name was in kindergarten, when the teacher called me on the first day of class, except I didn’t recognize her mangled pronunciation. “Why isn’t that kid speaking up,” my little kid brain wondered. “Maybe they aren’t here.”
Elementary school went on and most people settled on calling me muhREEnez. My father heard a kid calling me that one day, after school, and he was confused. “That’s not your name…”
Substitute teacher days always came with a feeling of dread. I was usually first or second on the roll call list (thank you A last name) so attendance time would start on those days with an awkward pause.
“Mareens?”
In the fifth grade, my mother asked me if I wanted to change the spelling of my name, add a z at the end instead of an s. I don’t remember how long I thought it over, but I do remember thinking, “…but I have a nameplate necklace.”
A painfully awkward 6th grade me introduced herself to a mixed grades Gifted course. I said my name for the class and one of the older boys said that name was too hard. He decided to call me Nancy, and I learned to respond to that.
Still, to this day, when a server is looking at credit cards to hand out at the table, I try to spot mine before they take too much time trying to pronounce my name.
And probably it doesn’t matter that much to people who have never been asked, “but what’s your name in English?” or people who have never been called Maringo in a dentist’s office. And probably it doesn’t matter to me as much as it once did. But these are the stories that are attached to being named Marines.
I’ve told a lot of stories on the Internet. I’ve said a lot about myself and my experiences, but these are the stories I’ve never before been able to say. Not until I said the first thing:
Hello. My name is Marines.
