Name

I just stumbled across a "This is Me" challenge on Pinterest, and I thought I'd go ahead and try answering some of the personal history questions.

Today's installment is centered around my name:  

What is your full name and how did you get that name?

I feel like my mom should be the one writing this down since I am bound to get it wrong.  All I can do is write about the explanations and storied I remember hearing as a child.

My name is Jennifer Lynn.  The fact that my middle name is Lynn was always obvious.  It is my mother's first name.  Jennifer is a little less obvious.  In fact just last night I was telling some friends that my mom actually wanted to name me Amalie.  The way I have always heard the story is that my dad nixed the name Amalie because it sounded too much like hominy.  He figured a girl with that name would get teased and be called "Grits".  Apparently hominy is a corn-like item that is used to make grits?  As someone who has never been in a culture where hominy is common, this story has always confused me.  But I digress.  Mom wanted to name me Amalie, and Dad nixed it.  He had his own brilliant idea.  My dad wanted to name me Jerusha!  (Because that wouldn't induce teasing of any kind...)  It was meant to be a tribute to Hyrum Smith's first wife, who was a wonderful woman.  But I am still pretty glad that my mom tabooed that one.  In the end they settled on Jennifer.  I was told, with a shrug, that it was the first name they agreed on and so that was that.

I was always distraught by the commonality of my name.  For the first several years of elementary school, I was always guaranteed to have at least two other Jennifer's in my class.  To make it even worse, my middle name, though in my case given for my mom, was often associated with the first name Jennifer.  I always wished my middle name with Elizabeth.  Not only was it a beautiful name, but it was also the name of my favorite character in my favorite book series (Sweet Valley Twins).  And as if that wasn't enough, if my name had been Jennifer Elizabeth Nunes, my initials would have been J.E.N.  And that would have been cool!

Do you have any nicknames?

My parents always told me that my nickname was Baby-Bundle, though I don't have any memories of being called that. I was born five weeks early in the middle of winter. I weighed 5 lbs 11 oz. My parents talked about me always being kept in a bundle of blankets and that is where that name came from.

Other than that, my nickname was always Jenny.  It worked well and pretty soon I had six younger siblings with matching nicknames:  Katy, Joey, Danny, Jimmy, Davy, Becky.  As adults my sister Katy and I are the only ones who didn't switch over to more formal versions of our names.  (And my brother Jimmy, who died the day he was born.)

When I was in 7th grade we moved and my mom told me it was a great opportunity to "change my identity" if I wanted to.  She knew I wanted a name that was more unique.  I think I passed at that point, but as I entered High School she brought up the same option.  In trying to come up with a more stand-out version of my name, we came up with - are you ready for this:  Jenn.  With TWO n's.  Yeah, we were WAY out there!  In retrospect I always wished I had drawn on my middle name and gone by something like JLynn.  (Jaelyn?) Oh well.  It wasn't meant to be.

In High School I did have one other name.  To my very large group of friends, I was known as Bob.  As was typical, my group of friends had more than one Jennifer in it.  People were getting confused so my friend and neighbor Tim decided to solve that problem by naming us Bob and Chuck.  Those names seriously stuck!  My name evolved into Jenny-Bob and when "Chuck" got married (to Tim!) she was known as Jen VanShadel.  Then I married into the Shadel family as well.  We were back to the old conundrum of matching names.  There were now two Jennifer Shadel's.  We were talking about it one day and brought up our old nicknames.  My mother-in-law stopped us right then and there and banned those "boy names" from ever being used in reference to her daughters-in-law.  Ever since then I have been exclusively Jenny,a name my SIL has never gone by, and she varies between Jennifer and Jen.

I have always hated being called Jennifer.  I always say that being called Jennifer is the most blatant sign that the person talking to me doesn't know me at all.  I have NEVER gone by my formal name.