Any Other Name
I stare into the camera, waiting for my cue. In the background, a shelf displays the brightly colored toys of my childhood, rendered in the fuzzy technicolor of a 1990s video recording. Next to me, a stuffed King Kong gazes off-screen.
“Tell us what your name is. And how old you are.” At this, my tiny body springs to life. I climb atop King Kong.
My voice, octaves higher and with a slight New Jersey accent, sings, “Fay Wray.”
“No, your real name first,” my mother says.
I pause and frown, then open my mouth to say something.
“Samantha, tell them what your real name is.”
I look at her as if trying to find the right answer in her face.
“What is your real name?” my mother prompts again.
I wait, then sigh, seemingly about to relent, but then I hide my face behind King Kong and say, “Fay Wray.”
“Go to your room,” my mother says.
“Samantha,” I intone, throwing the monkey aside.
“And how old are you?”
“Three,” I say. “Three, three, three,” I whisper, almost inaudible, to myself. It’s as though the repetition is bringing me back to the real world, a place where facts are static, unchanging.
“Thank you. Now you can tell them your make-believe name,” she says. “Look in the camera.”
“Fay Wray,” I say, though it doesn’t look like I believe it anymore.
No one can remember how I found the name Fay Wray. I doubt my parents let me see the 1933 “King Kong” in which the movie star Fay Wray plays the beautiful Ann Darrow. It’s possible that I got the stuffed monkey first, and my father told me the story: how a woman humanized the gigantic ape, how her beauty captured the heart of one of the most powerful forces in the world. It’s possible that I thought of nothing else for weeks.
Beauty-as-power is a theme throughout the film. Ann Darrow is an actress who is hired to appear in a movie on an uncharted island. When Jack Driscoll, the first mate on their ship, falls for Ann Darrow, the director of the film reminds him of the destructive power of beauty:
Driscoll: Think I’m going to fall for a dame?
Denham: Never knew it to fail. Some big, hard-boiled egg gets a look at a pretty face, bang, he cracks up and goes sappy.
Even as a child, I understood this. I had perceived that some girls had power over others in this way. As I grew older, I seemed to possess that power in different moments, though nowhere near as consistently as I’d have preferred. Perhaps by adopting a new name, I thought I could retain that power permanently. With its lax, open-mouthed repetition of sound, Fay Wray must have seemed like the most beautiful name in the world.
I started making lists, filling journals with every name I heard. Common ones were boring, so I searched for more unusual names. Zadie. Eugenie. Monique. I rolled the sounds over my tongue, making them mine. I spent hours huddled over a book of baby names, circling the ones I loved, then crossing out the ones with unfortunate or unremarkable meanings. I told myself that I was searching for a name for a future child, but one look at my lists would reveal that wasn’t true. My favorite names had an authoritative, self-possessed bent: Paulina, Marine, Sabina. They weren’t names of daughters; they were names of heroines. They were names of women who were adored, who had a story, who held power in their hands like glasses of water.
*
The precise combination of sounds and letters in a name can evoke sharper feelings than regular words. Everly was a favorite of mine before it was cool. The “ever” at the beginning gave it an ethereal quality, while the “ly” made it accessible, not overly profound. Everly was like keeping God in your pocket.
But underneath their sounds and the feelings they evoke at first glance, names also have meanings. Every name has a cultural or biblical history. My name sprung from the rib of the male “Samuel” in the eighteenth century. According to Behind the Name:
“From the Hebrew name (Shemu'el) meaning ‘name of God,’ from the roots (shem) meaning ‘name’ and ('el) meaning ‘God.’ Other interpretations have the first root being (shama') meaning ‘to hear’ leading to a meaning of ‘God has heard.’”
This meaning disappointed me. I craved the glamour of Sarah (“princess”) or Bonnie (“beautiful”) and envied some of my friends their name meanings (Amanda: “loveable.” Stephanie: “crown”). A name was a container to hold an epic, universal story—a mythology in a single word. Emmett Fox, a prominent spiritual leader of the twentieth century, said, “In the Bible, the ‘name’ of anything means the nature or character of that thing.” To “have a name” means to be publicly well-known, important. I saw names as portals into more interesting or powerful identities. I’d try them on: what would it be like if I were an Augustina? An Ondine? A wavy-haired Rafaella? A name was the word for who you were, and a part of me felt cheated that I hadn’t gotten to choose my own. I asked my mother if I could change my name when I grew up, and I think it bothered her. She didn’t understand why I collected names like other girls collected dolls, why I wanted to change mine. She had hoped that, with Samantha, she’d given me everything I needed.
*
I started making lists again when I met my partner. He and I both knew we wanted children, and it was fun to daydream about what we might name a future child. My friends were all having children, and some of them had “asked” their unborn child’s spirit what their name was ahead of their birth. I had heard stories about a husband and wife miraculously “downloading” the same name via dreams or in meditation. I wasn’t pregnant, but I tried it anyway. When I asked, a name appeared fully formed, spelled out in my head: Ayelet.
It was a name I’d never heard before, so I Googled it and found it was a Hebrew name that meant “deer.” I added it to my list of names. Months later, when I showed my partner the list, it was the only name he liked.
*
I loved Greek Mythology for the same reason I loved names. Each god and goddess had an identity, a purpose. They were important in different ways, but there was a place on Olympus for all of them. I especially loved Aphrodite, goddess of love and fertility, because she was beautiful, and all the gods were in love with her. I also loved Artemis, the wild one, goddess of the moon and protector of young girls. I pictured her and her nymphs naked dancing in the forest, basking in the sun, curling up with the wolves and lions they tamed.
I didn’t find out about Psamathe until my thirties. The first time I saw the name written, I was struck by its similarity to my own. The name is a trick: the “p” is silent, and the “e” is buoyant, turning the corners of the mouth upward into a smile as you say it. Sah-muh-thee. Like my own name, made ancient, without the frill of the excess “a,” the enunciated “n.” The “p” silent, invoking a whisper: psst. Like Samantha, but secret. Too special to be said out loud. I felt a shiver of thrill at the discovery.
In Greek mythology, Psamathe is the goddess of sand, the liminal space between land and sea. The story goes that she was raped by a king who refused to release her, even after she turned herself into a seal. She gave birth to a son named Phocus, who was murdered. To avenge his death, she sent a pack of wolves to his killers. This is largely what she is known for, the story her name tells: a story of love so deep it turns to cruelty.
*
My partner and I had been together almost exactly two years the day I started bleeding unexpectedly. I Googled it and got articles about implantation bleeding. It was possible that a fertilized egg had attached itself to my uterine lining. It was possible that I was pregnant. I had a pregnancy test left over from the days when pregnancy was a terrible thought that would keep me up at night. I saw two lines.
In that moment, a new name sprung like a branch out of my side: Mother. Before I called my partner and my own mother to tell them, I whispered the word to myself, learned how it felt in my mouth. Now, I had two names.
*
Knowing I was pregnant allowed me to inhabit other mental spaces, just like names had. In an instant, I became “full” in a way I imagined only actresses like Fay Wray could be—still, pensive, sanguine. Now, I had the permission to be slow and languorous, to take my time over meals, to sit in the sun for a minute. Now, I was significant without doing anything at all. My body was precious, and I had to take special care with what I ate, what I allowed near me: no seafood, no unnecessary supplements, no CBD, no heavy lifting, no changing the cat litter. My body was no longer just mine. Now, I was special, important enough to make small sacrifices.
I soon found that motherhood didn’t rely on individualization, on being “special,” the way my old identities had. To be a mother was extraordinary, but it was also extremely common. Maternal love, the most powerful love in the world, was felt by nearly every mother. There would be nothing unique in what I felt for my child, yet the depth of the feeling would be unlike anything I’d ever experienced. The ordinary now seemed unique, the prospect of being in a lineage of others, exciting. I would be just like everyone else, and I liked that. For the first time in my life, I was more focused on what I might feel than who I might be when compared with other people.
Still, I was scared. I was clear that motherhood meant the official death of girlhood. The things I’d always valued (beauty, radiance, passion, wildness, pleasure) would have to make way for something else, at least for a while. I knew that the things I had learned to become—attractive, calm, neat—would be obliterated in the face of caring for a child. I understood that parenting an infant would be like a death, and that terrified me. Besides, I had always loved too hard. What would I do when faced with a love even Greek goddesses went mad over? Forget my looks—what would become of my insides when I gave birth to something I loved more than myself?
*
There is far more complexity to pregnancy than I had ever understood. For a while, the bleeding that had alerted me to the pregnancy got heavier, and then it abated, and then it got heavier again. Then it got lighter, and then it got heavier and remained that way. I had three blood draws to check my hcG levels, and each one confirmed my levels were rising. I listened to a podcast that compared pregnancy to a war between the mother and the child for biological resources. That seemed to explain the bleeding.
When the bleeding got heavy again, I made another appointment. No one could tell me whether I was having a chemical pregnancy (when the body cancels out a pregnancy because of chromosomal abnormalities in the fetus) or whether it was just prolonged implantation bleeding. The doctors said I was still technically pregnant, but now the identity of Mother wavered before me, as if seen through lines of heat on a summer day. I lived in the liminal space between Mother and Not-Mother, between tenderness and unbearable bitterness.
A few weeks later, a fourth hCG blood draw revealed that my levels were going down. “You didn’t do anything wrong,” the doctor said in her message in the medical portal. “Sometimes these things just happen.” I stared at the computer, biting my lip, then spent two hours researching what I might have done wrong.
*
There had never been any pain. It was as if she were trying to slip out of this world without causing me any trouble: an introvert leaving a dinner party. I have so little information, but if I had to guess, I would say she would have been sweet like that: too smart and solitary for her own good. When her existence was possible, when it seemed inevitable, I felt, about her, the way I feel about my younger self on those 1990s video recordings: impossible love, made all the more painful because I couldn’t protect her.
In the following weeks, I picked fights with my partner, snapped at coworkers, ignored friends’ texts. Acne bloomed on my cheeks like a punishment. I repeated the name Psamathe to myself, immersed myself in her mythology, admired her ruthlessness. For the first time since Fay Wray, I renamed myself secretly. Ultimately, names are stories, and stories have always had the power to change things. Psamathe was darkness, tenderness that turned to vengeance. Holding Psamathe close and repeating it to myself in my darker moments allowed me to attach my pain to a universal pain. Attaching myself to her story gave my own story epic proportions, importance beyond what I knew how to give it myself. By naming the dark, angry part of myself, I integrated it. Perhaps this led me to the grief part more quickly than I otherwise would have reached it.
*
It took me by surprise one day in a hotel room. My partner had a conference at a resort near Palm Springs and I had tagged along, reading in bed and watching YouTube videos about the afterlife. One night, curled up in the chilled hotel room, we watched Forrest Gump, which I’ve seen at least a dozen times. I was only mildly engaged until the scene in which Forrest meets his son, who is about six years old, and also named Forrest, for the first time.
“Isn’t he beautiful?” Jenny asks Forrest after the little boy leaves the room.
“He’s the most beautiful thing I’ve ever seen,” he says. “But is he smart? Or is he like…” he gestures to himself.
“He’s very smart,” Jenny says. “He’s one of the smartest in his class.”
I hadn’t known I was crying until my partner turned away from the TV to look at me, which is when I heard the sounds coming out of my mouth, felt the wetness on my face. He held me for a few minutes, but after several minutes I still couldn’t stop. I took a shower to calm myself down. My wails bounced against the tile and across the hotel room, and he came to check on me a few times. I kept crying. I had never been able to access this level of grief, and the release of it felt like relief.
*
Why do most people keep the names they are given? A name is a word that’s repeated countless times throughout a person’s life. We’re made to believe that choice is always better than circumstance—that we can do better than fate—but I think there’s something to be said for staying true to our own mythologies. Maybe reinvention is a form of hubris, a violent act that defies the laws of nature like the death of Psamathe’s son, or her murderous revenge. Our own personal mythologies may not be objectively remarkable, but they evoke emotion in us. Our stories may not be famous, but they are known to the people in our lives. Maybe, no matter how painful or common or uninteresting our names or stories seem, it is better to live into them, to change them from the inside out. Maybe, in the end, it matters more what our lives feel like than what we’re called.
Losing my pregnancy gave me many significant things, one of which is that I no longer long for the “specialness” that Ann Darrow must have experienced as King Kong’s lover. The yearning to be seventeen stories high, held above the traffic, worshipped by power, has largely left me. Now, I am happy to have the more accessible feeling of power that comes from daily slowness and care, traits I have adopted from when I was, too briefly, a mother. In the end, I think that’s what I wanted all along: to be protected, to be treated like a precious thing, even if I was just like everybody else.
-Samantha Colicchio
Samantha Colicchio is a writer from New Jersey currently based in Southern California. Her work has been published in the Huffington Post and is forthcoming in Ohio State’s The Journal, Faultline, and The Rambling. She was a finalist for The Sewanee Review's Nonfiction Contest judged by Stephanie Danler, and her book-in-progress was nominated for the Allegra Johnson Writing Prize. An attendee of the Kenyon Review Summer Writer’s Workshop, she studied under Melissa Faliveno, and she was a finalist for the Kenyon Review Developmental Editing Fellowship. She graduated from NYU's Tisch School of the Arts, and she currently works as a writer and editor for a digital marketing company.