The name my mother gave me

It’s my birthday. I’m thirty-five. Thirty-five years ago, my mom brought me into this world. This will be my first one without her.

I go pay her a visit.

Something’s new; her headstone is there.

My brother and I have actually been waiting for the headstone for some time, to the point where we thought about calling the local cemetery and being all “Can I speak to your manager?” about it.

But now that it’s actually there, I kind of wish that it wasn’t; it’s just one more symbol that my mom’s passing from this world is real.

I rub my fingers across the letters that spell out her name, in English, or at least its closest approximation from Chinese.

It makes me think of my name, the name my mother gave me, thirty-five years ago.

Specifically, I mean my Chinese name.

Why not my English one? Well, my English name is cool—I actually love the way its shorter version sounds, looks, and the personality it invokes—but it doesn’t have that much meaning to me.

My mom originally wanted to call me ‘David,’ actually, because in the Bible he’s described as “a man after God’s own heart.”

She abandoned that idea once she learned about David doing that marriage infidelity thing with Bathsheba (forget the murder part, but whatever).

I wonder if she also didn’t like the David and Jonathan being best-friends-but-actually-gay-lovers rumor and avoided the name because of that. In which case, oops.

So she chose Daniel. Because supposedly he never sinned. The irony.

It’s a fun story, but not one that’s loaded with meaning. Unlike my Chinese name, the Chinese name she gave me.

There are many stories related to my birth. Some are probably exaggerated truths. Others are edited facts. But what are stories anyway, if not edited exaggerations?

Here’s one thing I do know: I was a surprise.

Life is full of surprises. Some are good. Some are bad. Some are Schrodinger tests in that they’re exactly as good or bad as you want them to be.

I struggled with being a surprise. I didn’t know I was one as a kid, but somehow I did know; I knew I changed the course of my mother’s life, and somehow, whenever I saw tears of grief and anger and anguish flow from her eyes, I felt responsible.

I felt guilty.

For a long time, I felt that the only penance I could pay for that guilt was to take my own life away. I haven’t felt that way in a while, and even if I did today, as I stand over her tomb, there’s no real point.

Here’s another thing I know: My mom gave me a Chinese name, a name with two parts.

Part one. It comes from my brother’s Chinese name: happiness, joy.

Like names in many cultures—even ‘Dan’—Chinese names are also given by how they sound, how they look, and the personalities and feelings they invoke. But they’re also given by something else: the qualities you hope the child will one day embody.

My mom wanted my brother to be happy.

Part two. Potentially, a bunch of things: favor, benevolence, merciful, kind.

This is because Chinese is one of those languages where the meaning in a character is a little loose and depends very much on what words you put around it.

Which is why my name, the character my mom named me after, can mean all of those things.

It can also mean ‘grace.’

That’s the word my mom meant when she chose my name. She chose ‘Grace.’ A gift you don’t deserve.

That’s how my mom chose to view me.

Through all the jokes, cuts, laughter, yelling, smiles, anger, moments of clarity, and even that final stretch of mental decline, that’s been the anchor I’ve held onto all these years, and the one I will keep returning to, to remind myself that the lies I used to believe about myself are just that—lies—whether I’m here visiting her at thirty-five, forty, or some far-off point in the future.

That when my mom came to name me in her own native tongue, she chose ‘Grace.’

Because that’s who I was to her. A surprise. A gift she didn’t deserve.