Dissipate
We were talking about last names for the baby and haven’t decided whether to hyphenate, use one of ours as a middle name, or what. Of course, there will be international travel so we want to make sure we are both identifiable as legal parents. And then it gets to my last name, which I kept from my last marriage – Dangermond. My maiden name is Namer – which is Sephardic and means Tiger.
I kept Dangermond because I cycled through so many names in my life – from Namer to Gratia to Franzen to Dangermond and just felt that I held this last one most dearly. Of course, there are attachments – I learned by being a Dangermond how to ignore things till they dissipate – which, by the way, is the word of the day on my home page.
This is contrary to what I learned as a Namer and that was to approach the world as prey and pounce indiscriminately and attack everything with the same degree of hunger and voraciousness. While Namer speaks to my heritage – I’m Sephardic via Turkey via Cuba, Dangermond’s French Huguenot via Holland via my ex speaks to another part of me.
However, lately I’ve come to believe I’ve lived my life lopsided towards one part of my gumbo heritage and have almost forsaken the Thigpen side, which I have strong ties to as well – this is my maternal side who came to America early and worked the land till they arrived here in the Gulf South.
But I feel like sometimes what you were given doesn’t have to be your fate. I was given blonde hair and a Sephardic core. Instead, I have chosen to be a redhead with an interesting last name. So the main thing here is that you can weave your own thread into the back story of your life, heredity is not destiny.
Surely any child we adopt will be offered up endless rich story lines from our collective heritage for them to rearrange as they see fit.