A woman Homer sung
Jumping on the bandwagon. Megan's 30 days meme is fun to read, and I am excited about Abby doing it as well, so here we go. Disclaimer: I am going to be worse than Abby at keeping this up.
My mother wanted to name me Heloise. After Abelard and Heloise, the famous French lovers from the Middle Ages who had worse lives than Romeo and Juliet. My father's reaction was an emphatic, "We are not naming her that". Bear in mind that my mother was 23, romantic, and probably blinded by the after effects of birthing a child. My father's response was to name me Bosco Mae instead, and my mother didn't think well of that one. Eventually my dad came up with Ellen and they decided on Ellen Marie because it sounded "strong and pretty" (according to my baby book).
Ellen is the middle name of one of my aunts who also happens to be my godmother and whose husband was my very first regular babysitter. My parents started a trend when my brother Christopher James Arrington Parent has the middle names of my father's only brother and my mother's maiden name. The trend has continued with all of my cousins but the two youngest with middle names that somehow relate to an uncle or father. They are all boys, so eventually names got scarce for the youngest boy and the only other girl.
I absolutely love my name. It is unique enough so that I can count how many Ellens I know who are the same age, but not so strange that no one knows how to spell it. It embodies me quite well. I can't imagine being called anything else. Ellen is a rather convoluted bastardization of the name Helen and therefore also means light. It also a has a nice symmetrical feel to it and in the phonetic alphabet it is Echo-Lima-Lima-Echo-November. My family and Zach call me Ellie, which, despite being no shorter than Ellen, has a nice ring to it.
Of course, neither of these was my first name. Before I was born, my parents called me Eggbert. Apparently they also had a pet avocado plant named Eggbert, though that one didn't survive very long.
The letters of Abelard and Heloise can be found here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aah/index.htm
The title is the name of a poem by Yeats from The Green Helmet and other poems.
My mother wanted to name me Heloise. After Abelard and Heloise, the famous French lovers from the Middle Ages who had worse lives than Romeo and Juliet. My father's reaction was an emphatic, "We are not naming her that". Bear in mind that my mother was 23, romantic, and probably blinded by the after effects of birthing a child. My father's response was to name me Bosco Mae instead, and my mother didn't think well of that one. Eventually my dad came up with Ellen and they decided on Ellen Marie because it sounded "strong and pretty" (according to my baby book).
Ellen is the middle name of one of my aunts who also happens to be my godmother and whose husband was my very first regular babysitter. My parents started a trend when my brother Christopher James Arrington Parent has the middle names of my father's only brother and my mother's maiden name. The trend has continued with all of my cousins but the two youngest with middle names that somehow relate to an uncle or father. They are all boys, so eventually names got scarce for the youngest boy and the only other girl.
I absolutely love my name. It is unique enough so that I can count how many Ellens I know who are the same age, but not so strange that no one knows how to spell it. It embodies me quite well. I can't imagine being called anything else. Ellen is a rather convoluted bastardization of the name Helen and therefore also means light. It also a has a nice symmetrical feel to it and in the phonetic alphabet it is Echo-Lima-Lima-Echo-November. My family and Zach call me Ellie, which, despite being no shorter than Ellen, has a nice ring to it.
Of course, neither of these was my first name. Before I was born, my parents called me Eggbert. Apparently they also had a pet avocado plant named Eggbert, though that one didn't survive very long.
The letters of Abelard and Heloise can be found here: http://www.sacred-texts.com/chr/aah/index.htm
The title is the name of a poem by Yeats from The Green Helmet and other poems.