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Writer's Block: A rose by any other name
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The only person who still calls me by my first name is my mother. My given name is Mary Margaret, and no, I was not raised Catholic. My parents were Southern Baptist and clueless (my mother was shocked when I told her that people regularly asked me if I'm Catholic after hearing my name).
I've never liked the name Mary, at least not for me. It was the most common name for females for hundreds of years, and it's still almost always way up there on the list. There were three Marys in my first grade class, and it just got worse from there. I even spelled it Mari when I was in high school to differentiate myself, but people kept calling me Marr-ee. So when I got divorced and went back to my maiden name, I decided that I was going to do something about it.
I made a list of all the variants and nicknames for both Mary and Margaret that I could come up with, using baby name books (this was in the pre-internet days). I perused the list multiple times, and tried them all out with my last name and so forth. I didn't want a name that ended with the "ee" sound, because to me it sounded diminiutive.
And so I finally came up with Meg, and that's who I am now. I've been Meg almost as long as I was Mary. The only thing I don't like about it is that people do tend to call me Megan. I am not a Megan, I am a Meg. But it usually only takes one or two corrections per person and they don't do that again [g]. And there aren't nearly as many Megs as there are Marys. Or Megans, for that matter.
The only person who still calls me by my first name is my mother. My given name is Mary Margaret, and no, I was not raised Catholic. My parents were Southern Baptist and clueless (my mother was shocked when I told her that people regularly asked me if I'm Catholic after hearing my name).
I've never liked the name Mary, at least not for me. It was the most common name for females for hundreds of years, and it's still almost always way up there on the list. There were three Marys in my first grade class, and it just got worse from there. I even spelled it Mari when I was in high school to differentiate myself, but people kept calling me Marr-ee. So when I got divorced and went back to my maiden name, I decided that I was going to do something about it.
I made a list of all the variants and nicknames for both Mary and Margaret that I could come up with, using baby name books (this was in the pre-internet days). I perused the list multiple times, and tried them all out with my last name and so forth. I didn't want a name that ended with the "ee" sound, because to me it sounded diminiutive.
And so I finally came up with Meg, and that's who I am now. I've been Meg almost as long as I was Mary. The only thing I don't like about it is that people do tend to call me Megan. I am not a Megan, I am a Meg. But it usually only takes one or two corrections per person and they don't do that again [g]. And there aren't nearly as many Megs as there are Marys. Or Megans, for that matter.