What's in a Name?

 

                   I know virtually nothing about the day I was born—not the time of day, length of labor, birth weight and length—nothing except the date, February 21st, and the St. Louis hospital.  However, in the family lore, I remember hearing something about the name I was given.  My mother had an older sister named Rayma, a creation combining my grandmother’s maiden name, Ray, with Ma, what the family called one of its senior members. 

                My parents didn’t have many worldly goods in their apartment but they did have a baby chest when their first child, my older brother, was coming.  The story goes that my father liked the name “Rayma” so much that he painted it on the back of this baby chest.  However, it would have to go on hold when the baby was a boy who was named William Howard Owens, Jr.  Now one would think with such excitement about a girl’s name building, when a baby girl was born about three and a half years later, she would be called by this wonderful, creative and unusual name.  It was after all, my first name.  But for whatever reason—I wish I knew—a middle name as distinctive as “Kay” would be what they called me.

                Once I started attending school, teasing and name calling started when each new teacher would call me “Rayma” before I let him or her know I went by “Kay.” At the time, a popular television show was called, “Ramar, Queen of the Jungle.”  So part of the teasing was connected to this show , a comparison I did not find humorous.  Generally, I was called “Kay-Kay,” a much kinder and appealing version of my name.

                I was not a trailblazer in my family when I decided to go by my actual first name.  My younger brother was named Glen Michael, and we called him Michael.  In the 50s and 60s, it was a very popular name, so as my family moved to a different school district when Michael was in middle school, he chose to use his first name, one much less common.  Perhaps his path planted a seed for future possibilities for me.

Beginning in the early 90s, I saw various doctors and specialists, including some at Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minnesota.  I grew tired of telling them I used my middle name, so I just went along with Rayma.  Often nurses would say they liked the unusual name which they often claimed they had not heard before.  Actually, I was in line for getting an ID at a big state school, the University of Missouri in Columbia, before I met another person other than my aunt with the same name.

When my husband and I left our hometown and lifetime residence in St. Louis to come to Charleston in 2015, I decided to use Rayma as my name.  A contributing factor in making this change was what I had learned about the word “rhema,” spelled differently but pronounced the same. When I started attending charismatic Bible study and prayer groups, I learned rhema means “utterance” or “thing said” in Greek.  In the book of Hebrews, chapter four, it is the word described as “living and active.”  Knowing this also moved me toward my first name.  However, our daughter and her family had lived in Charleston for three years before we made the move; her church members and neighbors had known me as Kay and probably thought I was a little loony suddenly using a different name.  Such things keep life interesting.

Now my husband had called me Kay for over forty-six years and was not too keen on the name change in our new life on the Illinois prairie.  He always called me Kay, the name of the girl he fell in love with so many years ago.