Your Name Becomes You

aw, jeez

Family legend has it that my parents took days to decide what to call me. Finally, they settled on “Ruth”, but what made up their minds? Did I tell them myself? Did something in my eyes speak of my nature and they took the cue? I do know that my mother’s cousin had a daughter some weeks after I was born and also called her Ruth. Mum was peeved at that. I guess she’d hoped that my name would make me unique among my peers, and as it happened, she wasn’t far off the mark.

My fifth grade teacher once took me into the hall and had me wait there while he returned to the classroom. “This room,” I heard him say, “is now Ruth-less.”

I remember rolling my eyes while my classmates groaned. Even ten-year-old kids know a lame joke when they hear it..

After I started writing in earnest, I got a baby name book to help me with a story set in France. I found a ton of names with French comparatives, not to mention German, Norse, Italian, Spanish, Old English, Celtic, Hebrew, etc. Naturally, I looked up my own name to see what it meant.

(Insert laugh here.)

Ironically, the few Ruths whom I encountered growing up were not particularly pleasant individuals. The one in ninth grade was a nasty acquaintance, the complete antithesis of what the name actually means (she might have been a better friend but I can’t say because she definitely wasn’t a friend of mine). Through work recently, I had a conversation with another Ruth who asked me if I liked my name. “I must do,” I replied. “since I haven’t changed it.”

We agreed that now it’s cool to have a name that missed the top ten of our generation, though at the time it was awkward to stick out so formally among all the Debbies and Lindas and Karens and Pattys in school. (No one called me Ruthie until I reached my thirties, when it burst on scene alongside other nicknames such as “Ruthless”, “Rufus”, “Rufie”, and my personal favourite, “Ru”.)

Then there’s the Biblical connection—despite having her own book in the Old Testament, Ruth was hardly a superhero. “Whither thou goest, I will go,” she said to her mother-in-law after she was widowed—and off the two went like Thelma and Louise without the guns or a bare-chested Brad Pitt. I was, however, a third of the holy trinity at one office, working for years alongside an Esther and an Eve. Now I’m paired with a Naomi who is not my mother-in-law but is most certainly my mentor at work. and as for my role at home … whither Ter goes, I also goest—and I’m totally good with it.

A few years into our friendship, Nicole sent me the card pictured at the top of this post with the explanation that “Ruth” was the name of the heroine in a novel she was writing and the definition had helped her to find the character’s voice. She sent the card to me in propinquity, with the reminder that I was often in her thoughts (who’s the beautiful friend here, eh?), and it sat on my desk for months before I thought to tuck it into one of my journals.

I might have laughed when I first learned that “Ruth” means “friend”, but it may actually mean more than that. Check this out:

So now, my name is subjective depending on my relationship with the individual. Choose your definition, but don’t tell me what you’ve picked!

With love,