Grown in My Heart is having another blog carnival, this time the topic is names.
When we were in the adoption process is seemed so important to me to name our daughter. Besides the usual fun of choosing a name for a new baby, I thought by giving the boy’s new sister a name, it would make their sister seem more real.
Jason & I discussed names ad nauseum. Jason’s favorites were more European names, Fiona, Gretchen, Annika, etc. While I like those names, I think they come with a certain expectations. When I hear those names the images in my head are of blonde or red haired girls of European decent. I knew we didn’t want people doing a double take every time they saw our very Asian daughter with her very Irish/German name. In the end, we settled on Tova, a Scandinavian & Hebrew name, but one that is not often heard so few people have an image in their head already when they hear the name. I believe the winning argument was the definition in the Baby Name Wizard – it said Tova was a name with International Flair. Well, that was our daughter, quite the International Baby! It also helped that it was the name of one of my closest friends.
Never once did we consider keeping her birth name as her first name. We knew we would keep it as a middle name, but even then, she would have 2 middle names.
I fear we were too hasty to discount the possibility.
My daughter’s Vietnamese name is Thanh. We had many pronunciations for it (all wrong, Tahn & Tawn) & our agency was no help. When we arrived in Hanoi & met Thanh we learned the pronunciation of her name wasn’t all that hard – the vowels in Vietnamese are very nuanced but Thanh sounds very similar to Tine.
Thanh was to be one of her middle names. Someday’s I wish it was her first name.
It wasn’t given to her by anyone special, as far as we know she was named by the orphanage director. But it was her name. It was what her caregivers called her. It was hers. And we changed it because it wasn’t what we wanted.
There were lots of reasons why we didn’t call her Thanh, the confusing spelling & pronunciation, the fact we’d have to anglicize the spelling in order to give people a shot at it & wasn’t that changing the name anyway? But mostly we didn’t because in our hearts & minds, she was Tova.
And she is Tova. It suits her. But if one day she wants to be called Thanh, I’ll be more than happy to oblige.
K~












