It is all in a name

When DH and I were pregnant with DD (15 years ago), we had a big debate on her middle name. Although her first name was a gift from God and was just known to be her name, her middle name seemed elusive. We joked that it should start with an “F” so that her initials matched that of the family business, but DH said that the “F” should stand for Fox. Although I thought it sounded pretty cool, I remembered the middle name reveal that occurred for every child around middle school. I figured DD would not appreciate Fox too much at that age. I, also, could not imagine myself hollering her name out. I could just imagine the other parents looking at me thinking “Did she say what I thought she said?” I tried to convince him that Faith would be an acceptable replacement, but he wasn’t crazy about it. We bantered back and forth for weeks until we went in a completely different direction and gave her the middle name of Troi. Several of you are wondering how this is any better than Fox, but there are a few of you who are saying that is cool, because you know the origin.

Troi comes from Deanna Troi that was an empath on the Star Trek Enterprise during the Next Generation series. Uniquely, Deanna has the ability to discern other people’s feelings. She couldn’t quite read their minds, but she could feel if they were being honest or not. She also had the honor of being the highest ranking female officer on the Enterprise. We thought this was a perfect name for all that we could hope for our DD and so we both agreed that Troi was perfect. And so it has been. . .

Flash forward to today; DD has now embarked to live up to her name. We always took the name to be symbolic representing strength, courage, empathy, etc. Yesterday, she has begun the path that may potentially lead her toward it being an accurate description. DD went to her first Sea Cadet drill. She has been talking about an interest in the Navy for several years and she is very excited about the opportunity to see if this may be a direction from her life. Sea Cadets is a Youth organization that prepares children from the Navy or Coast Guard. It will allow her the opportunity to participate in any of the trainings that the adults do and if she chooses the Navy as the direction for her life then she will be ahead of the other enlisted men and woman. I think it is certainly too early to say if she will stick with it or not. I can tell you that she was extremely enthusiastic about it after visiting this week and that we will be back for the next drill in two weeks.

So I guess the moral of the story is that you better think long and hard about the name that you give your child because perhaps you are subconsciously edging them toward that future.