the name game

The other day I got a call from Niamh's teacher at school, and one thing I’m learning is that my name is no longer important. According to the school, my name is no longer Dalton, or Ms Dorné or even Mrs Fitzsimmons – its ‘Niamh’s mom’. How and when I lost my identity to my two year old, I’m not sure. I first noticed it when emailing with them over the summer about tuition and school dates, and I would sign my emails with ‘Dalton’ and my signature is at the bottom of all of them (Dalton Dorné, Regional Marketing Director blah blah blah). Yet, the return email would always say Dear Niamh’s Mom….

I can deal with being stripped of my other identities, but when the teacher called me I realized that she doesn’t pronounce Niamh’s name correctly – and it sounded like Nee-am, rather than Neeve. This isn’t good as we are in the bad habit of calling her by her Chinese name at home, Mei Mei, and she already has little to no recognition of her English or rather, Irish, name. Its one thing to be solely known as ‘Niamh’s mom’ but it’s quite another to be ‘Nee-am’s mom’.

We have no one to blame but ourselves for this predicament, as really, we should be using ‘Niamh’ more at home. And I’m afraid correct pronunciation is a lifelong struggle she’ll face, a challenge that comes with the decision to go with an original vs Anglican spelling. But when we thought of this issue on day five in the hospital with as yet un-named baby, we always assumed she’d spend her life correcting people on her name, not learning to say it wrong herself!

I quickly corrected the teacher on the pronunciation, and was met with an, “oh ok” that didn’t really convince me that she ‘got it’. My concerns were confirmed a few days later when my husband got a call for ‘Nee-am’s dad’. He quickly wrote a note to the teacher to phonetically spell out the pronunciation and we’ve since made a pact to try to use ‘Niamh’ more at home too.

Still, she talks about herself in the third person, always as ‘Mei Mei’. ‘Mei Mei wants cheese’. ‘Mei Mei no take nap’.

Do your kids have name preferences?

Anyone else have trouble with a difficult to pronounce name in an English as second-language environment?