(Originally posted Friday, January 13, 2006)
My Dear Willa~
Nothing in the mail today - but then I did not really expect anything.
Today, Mollie and I were reading about Dora the Explorer, who talked about her big adventures. Mollie said, "I don't like my adventures. They're scary."
I thought about the adventures that she has been through and that you are going through and will go through, and I agreed that they are, indeed, very scary. They're much scarier than what most grown-ups I know could handle.
"My adventures are scary, too, sometimes, I told her. But they're also exciting and silly and funny and happy sometimes, too. Adventures are like that."
This is the entry in which I talk about your name and how it came to be your name.
First, I will tell you that, assuming you have been born, you already have a name that is yours and always will be yours. It will mean something, like your sister's name JiaXue means "good snow." But it will mean something more than Chinese vocabulary.
Your Chinese name is your tangible, legal link to the life you have now - the life before you came to our family and to the U.S. You are loved and cared for by people who will always remember you by that name.
And already you are loved by people who know you by a name you have not yet heard: Willa.
People ask if you are going to be named after someone, and the answer is "sort of."
My great-grandfather - my maternal grandmother's father - came to the U.S. from Sweden and raised a ho useful of children who all loved him dearly. In my grandmother's eyes, Jesus Christ may have been sitting at the right hand of God, but her father was seated at the right hand of Christ. His name was Axel Lagergren - neither of which lend themselves to a beautiful girl's name.
But his middle name was Wilhelm.
Wilhelmina has a beautifully lyrical sound, but written down it is lunky and over-crowded with consonants.
Shorten it to Willa, and you have a name that is reasonably soft and curvy if you think the L's and A. Yet that W can be sharp or showy or strong or playful. It's all in how you put it out there.
It also is the name of not one but two Tuscan empresses, one of whom is credited with founding the Badia in Florence in 978. She is also your great-many-times-removed grandmother on your father's side.
And then there is William, my grandmother's brother, who died just a few months ago. He was an excelptionally kind and smart man - an Air Force officer and physician. He and his wife took in my mother when she was pregnant with me, and always treated us as especially loved members of the family. So you are named after him, too.
Of course, Willa will be your own name, too, to make of it whatever you will.
Here are the first names you escaped:
Hannah
Hana
Chaya
Zia
Maura
Maralia
Mirabelle
Annabelle
Annelise
Mina
Sara
Maizie
Oh, there were so many others.
And now we still must find a middle name.
~Mom
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