The Weight of a Light Name

My mother named me Lauren Brooke. She named my older brother Scott Justin. They are WASP-y names that evoke blonde American children playing in tennis whites, drinking lemonade under a suburban sun. She said she liked the way the names sounded, clean and lovely, names that would grow with us from childhood to adulthood. Our names, like many “American” names, came from somewhere else but were now tied to nothing. Both were vaguely Anglo; Lauren literally means “a crown of Laurel leaves” in Latin, symbolizing victory or honor- but I doubt my mother knew any of this when she gave it to me. I didn’t know too many Laurens until later, when in the 90s and 00s the world seemed to explode with Laurens, most of them now in their twenties and thirties and as far as I can tell - blonde.

But the names our parents give us say more about them than about us. My mother was no different. Growing up, she only ever wanted to be fully American. She was an only child of immigrant Holocaust survivor parents and was always desperate to fit in. Her friends ate things like Meatloaf and Wonder Bread and Macaroni and Cheese while watching Johnny Carson with their young, stylish parents. My mother’s childhood home was quiet and filled with the smells of boiled cabbage and paprika, from dishes that had unpronounceable names. Her parents were older when they had her, and they spoke in Hungarian or harshly accented English, each word always tinged with something sad or angry.They had lost too much. She felt their sadness and respected it, carrying it with her like a terrible badge of survival. But this was a new country and she was young and she hated being different. She wanted, badly, to be like the other girls - the Marshas and Cindys and Carols who had uncomplicated parents, who - if they were Jewish - were born into a shinier, newer and sharply American generation, their heritage almost a quaint afterthought they would pull out from time to time when eating a knish or complaining about schlepping golf clubs or groceries. Yiddish to them was funny. To my mother, it was the secret code her parents spoke when they didn’t want her to understand. Her American friends seemed blissfully ignorant of the weight that sad language carried.

Not my mother. Even her own name weighed too much: Suzanne - but not from the French, instead an approximation of her two grandmothers names, “Zhenny” and “Anne” both of whom had been dead for years by the time she was born. One of an undefined illness, the other in Auschwitz. She knew without being told that she had to carry forth their legacy, even if she didn’t understand what that was. So she tried to be perfect; she did all the right things. She got good grades, went to college, married a nice Jewish American doctor. And she gave her fair-skinned, clear-eyed children thoroughly American names, names without a past. Later when my younger brother was born she felt differently, and gave him a more Jewish name: Zachary Sol. He was named after dead grandparents, too. 

And so while I have never fully related to my name and even briefly considered changing it, I don’t know myself as anyone else. This is what we inherit from our parents, for better or for worse: their dream of who they want us to be. My name reflects her loneliness, her longing, her need to fit in - but also her desire to make things up to her parents, as if any one person could compensate for such tragedy. In naming me, she hoped that my life would be as melodious as she said my name sounded; a light name, so weightless it was tied to nothing but a wish for happiness.