I was in the doctor’s office this week. I’ve been in several this week as a category 5 cold hit with the speed, ferocity and staying power of a hurricane slamming into the coast of Florida. I’m on the upside of it, I think.
Anyway, I was in the eye doctor’s office. The nurse called me in, “Doraine, if you’ll come with me.” The technician came in the little room, “Hello, Pamela. How are you today?” At the pharmacy, I’m Bennett with a date attached. Back in Georgia, I have medical records under Pamela Bennett, Doraine Bennett, and Pamela Doraine Bennett, sometimes multiple files at the same office. Mothers don’t call your children by their middle name. It gets more complicated the older you get!
I sign my emails Doraine. I order coffee as Dori. My girls call me Mama. My boys call me Mom. To my grands, I’m Dori. Jeanetta often calls me Dori in the studio, since it feels a bit strange for her to call her mom Doraine. Except for the occasions when I have made some blunder into Mom territory!
A few weeks ago, someone at the yoga studio asked me if I prefer to be called Doraine or Dori. My response was that I answer to both. She pressed a bit, wanting to know my preference. I had to think about it. Back in Georgia, no one called me Dori other than my grandchildren. When my first grand was born, he had two set of grandparents and four sets of great grandparents living, so all the traditional grandma names were pretty much taken. I got to pick my own grandma name and chose Dori (before Disney chose it). I like my grandma name a lot. I blogged under the name DoriReads for many years and have used it as a moniker for reading books onto audio files for my grandchildren’s birthdays for over twenty years.
As I was searching the web for something of substance to add here about the importance of names, I stumbled on this article from the New York Times.
In 1948, two professors at Harvard University published a study of thirty-three hundred men who had recently graduated, looking at whether their names had any bearing on their academic performance. The men with unusual names, the study found, were more likely to have flunked out or to have exhibited symptoms of psychological neurosis than those with more common names.
It made me laugh, because my name has been mispronounced my entire life. Could I possibly blame that for any of my internal issues? For years now, I have responded to people’s questioning look when I told them my name with, “Like ‘duh rain in Spain’.”
So here in this new location, in a new place in my life, in a space of trying to discern who I am once again, Dori feels like a good fit. We’ll see. (My mantra for this season!) What do you think?
Sorry you’ve been so under the weather! No fun!!