Summer Savoury

Who Am I? They thought I would be a boy and they picked the name Lorne. The nurses thought I would be twins. Mom said I was overdue by a whole month. Finally, an earthquake shook me out. So, what to name this girl, so slow in coming? None of the dozen or so girl cousins before me had our grandmother’s name, so perhaps it was time to paste that onto someone. Grandma was Helena, they named me Helen. Not quite the same. You can shorten Helena to Lena, kind of cute, but Helen is just Helen, there’s not much you can do with that. Why didn’t they make it my second name? Then I could have hidden it better. Now, whenever anything official comes up and I have to write or say my first name, I have to confess it. It is Helen. It’s not like anyone ever uses it (except officials who see it on a form) so why did they put it first? My second name, Loriane, is not much better. First, it was dad who went in to the government office in Murrayville to sign the birth register a month after I was born. I have learned since that Loriane is a French name and we are definitely not French so how did he come up with that? One story mom told me was that they intended my name to be Loriann (pronounced Lori-Ann) so did dad just not spell it right, or could the officials not read his writing? At any rate, they did not want me to be called Lori, which that name would probably get shortened to, so they started calling me Lorraine and that stuck. Little kids called me Rain. To make matters worse, when I turned 6 they taught me to spell my name LAURRIAN. After years of telling people that you pronounce Laurrian as Lorraine I got tired of it and started to tell people my name was Lori-Ann and that caught on with a few but totally confused my siblings. They thought I was being pretentious, trying to be something different than I was – plain Jane Lorraine. At 18 years of age I needed to travel and consequently I needed my birth certificate. I had never seen it, so I had to send away for one. That is when I first learned that my middle name was really Loriane. That threw me. I debated what to do? If I spent $50.00 I could apply for it to be changed to Laurrian, the name I’d been using for 18 years but I didn’t have a lot of money, so I didn’t do that. I started using Loriane instead, once again messing with my sibling’s minds. More complications arose when I met Grant (whose actual name is William - Bill or Billy or Mac or Buddy if you’re a Sheryl Crow fan). At that time I was using the pronunciation of Lorraine, and that is also what he heard my family call me, so of course that is what he used. I decided to let it be until after we’d been married about 10 years and we started attending a church where there were 4 other Lorraines. People were getting confused with all of us, so when someone noted that my name was not spelled Lorraine, but Loriane they asked me how it was really supposed to be pronounced. I said “Lori-Ann”, so they asked if it would be okay for them to call me that. I said sure, I liked it better anyway and that is when my major name misery really began. I wonder, if God were to call me by name, what would He call me? I have no sense of a name truly belonging to me. Who am I?