Written by Madeleine Minks
Art by Eva Colabatistto
Note: All parties whose names are stated provided their consent for use in this article.
Names in my family have a history of shifting like water. Three out of four of my grandparents don’t/didn’t go by their legal name, and the remaining one legally changed his last name (one of ten children, he was the only one to do so). My mother’s mother prefers her nickname, my father’s mother only goes by her American name, and my father’s father just had an unusual first name and nobody used it.
In my room there’s a drawer full of memorabilia that my mother can’t fit in her room. In it is a scrapbook with the name MANUELA spelt diagonally over the cover in colorful felt letters. When I discovered this as a little kid, I asked my mother who Manuela was and why her book was in my mother’s stuff. My mother informed me that she was Manuela, and that she’d legally changed her name to Anna when she was seven. The only reason she could give me when I asked why was that she wanted to.
This had baffled me. Her parents, her strict Catholic parents, had just let their eldest child legally change her name because she wanted to? And what was wrong with Manuela?
At the same time, I understood, because I had always known her name to be Anna. She was an Anna to me, not a Manuela. I tried to align photos of my mom as a child, the little blonde girl contained behind ‘70s sepia, with the name Manuela. It was doable, but only if I squinted.
If you’re reading this, and you know me in person (and you’re not my parents, hi Mom, hi Dad), then you probably know me as May. If we’ve met but you haven’t been in a class or had to email me before, you might not even have known May isn’t my real name.
My real and legal name is Madeleine Minks. My name is unique to me; as in, it’s not tied to any of my family history. I’m not named after anyone in or outside of my family. I’ve asked my mother multiple times who I was named after, never fully believing her answer when she tells me she just always liked the name. My parents even had a custom book made for me, where little animals in the forest all brought together letters to spell out the name “Madeleine” (I did not enjoy the Madeline books by Ludwig Bemelmans, in case you were wondering. She spells it wrong).
For the first twelve years of my life, everyone called me Madeleine–or at least they were supposed to. If you have a name that has a common nickname attached to it, then you’re familiar with this scenario: people will, no matter how many times you tell them, go back to that nickname. Most people are good about respecting names, but there’s always that one friend who forgets, or that gym teacher who doesn’t care, or that one classmate who likes to mess with you on purpose. If I had a nickel for every time someone called me Maddie, I could retire now. It’s always baffled me; I’m not a Maddie! I don’t look like a Maddie, I don’t act like a Maddie. I don’t know what a Maddie looks or acts like, to be honest, but she certainly doesn’t look or act like me.
May first came to be in seventh grade, when my middle school best friend–who herself sported a savvy three-letter name–insisted that Madeleine was too long and too formal. (It would have been hypocritical of me to complain about this. In sixth grade I had started calling a close friend by a nickname without even realizing it, partly because it sounded somewhat similar to her actual name and partially because of demeanor. We don’t talk much anymore but I see on her Instagram that she still uses the name.) She tried out different nicknames for me, hoping to find one that stuck, including Liney, which was a hard no for me. I have no memory of how, but eventually she suggested May, and I agreed to it.
I guess I thought that it would be a temporary thing, or at least something that only this friend would call me. Only in hindsight can I see how the nickname spread like a fungus.
Some of my middle school friends followed my best friend’s example and started using the nickname. The nickname stayed between my friends, contained like a firefly in a jar until high school. I still introduced myself as Madeleine, but offered May as an alternative to my friends. When I started college, however, I started introducing myself not as Madeleine, but rather as Madeleine-but-you-can-call-me-May-if-you-want. I did this introduction over and over and over again over Zoom–to orientation groups, to my professors, and to my classmates. I quickly discovered something surprising: when presented with those two options, Madeleine and May, every person, without fail, chose May. Even though I stated that I didn’t care either way, people always called me May. It felt odd at first to have my professors call me May, a nickname previously only used by close friends. It was like breaking in a new pair of jeans, feeling a little odd and out of place but knowing if you stick with them long enough, you’ll probably grow into them.
At first I wondered if people went with May because it was simply the easier option. That might be true to an extent, but I began to wonder if it was more an act of kindness, rather than one of convenience on the part of my peers and teachers. Maybe “you can call me May” was being interpreted as “please call me May.” Or, maybe, it was a combination of both kindness and convenience.
Conveniently for me, I have a friend who also goes by Mae (same pronunciation, different spelling). Like me, she doesn’t care if people refer to her by her nickname or her longer, legal name. Also like me, nearly everyone in her life calls her Mae. In both of our cases, we have a few select friends who call us by our full names. For Mae, the assortment of people who use her legal name are random; for me, though, only my oldest friends use my legal name.
There’s a part of me that craves to understand the meaning of both my names, even if both of them were picked simply because the people picking them (my mother and my best friend) liked them. The issue with this is that name origins mostly come from baby name websites, which themselves don’t tend to cite any sources as to where they got their information. Here’s what I know on my own:
Madeleine is a name of French origin. The only time I’ve been able to find those personalized keychains you get in gift stores where my name was spelt correctly was in Quebec, a French speaking area. (The American ones always spell it Madeline. I never cared much for them anyways, but I had to buy the Canadian one just to prove a point.) Madeleine is also a delicious French cookie, though anyone who’s eaten a madeleine knows they’re more cake-like than cookie-like. Madeleine also bears resemblance to Magdalene, as in Mary Magdalene, a Catholic saint who was the first person to discover that Jesus’s tomb was empty.
May is a little harder to pin down, with seemingly no definitive geographical or cultural origin, at least not one that the internet can agree upon. It is, of course, the English name for the fifth month of the solar calendar (fun fact: I was due in May but was born three weeks early. Maybe I should have been called April instead). The baby name website (okay, I caved) The Bump cites the name May as meaning “to go, move.” Pretty broad, but it definitely suits me if that’s true.
(It was only years after I took on the name May that I remembered my Chinese name. I studied Mandarin for five years, and all students were given a Chinese name similar to their given name. The phonetic spelling of my Chinese name was Mei-dai-lin, though I dropped the middle syllable and went by Mei-lin. It had already been three years since I’d studied Mandarin by the time my best friend gave me the nickname, and I’d completely forgotten that I’d already gone by May, albeit with a different spelling and a different connotation, for years.)
I would be remiss not to bring up the cultural connotations of names, and what it says when we change a name given to us in a different cultural context.
As I mentioned, my mother was born Manuela Therese Crane, a Spanish name through and through. Anna Crane Minks does not sound so Spanish. While my mother had never hid nor shunned her Spanish identity, it’s not something she feels deeply connected to, either. She doesn’t speak the language, and her last descendant to live there, her great grandmother, died a few years before she was born. Perhaps even more importantly, she didn’t grow up surrounded by Spanish-speaking family or peers. The name, while beautiful, may have felt culturally disconnected from her own identity.
My father has never changed his name, but it feels culturally cleaved like my mother’s. He inherited his name from his German grandfather, and while it reflects his father’s side of the family, his Taiwanese heritage has no bearing on his name.
My father’s mother, as previously mentioned, goes by her American name. She also uses my grandfather’s last name, despite the fact that they were separated for years before his death. I didn’t even know her legal first name until I was seventeen, when the topic of her name came up in the context of my then-unborn cousin. My cousin was going to be named after her two grandmothers, with her first name coming from her maternal grandmother and her middle name coming from her paternal grandmother, our shared grandmother. Somehow, the subject of my grandmother’s “real” name came up, which she shared willingly (I strain to remember if there was any reluctance on Nai Nai’s part. Did she want that piece of her shared at a table full of mostly white people who didn’t have those strong cultural ties of a name stretching halfway across the world?). Someone asked why my cousin shouldn’t take that name as her middle name instead, but my grandmother just waved them off.
I sat there, stunned and a little sick with myself. I knew she must have gone by a different name before she came to America, but I had never thought to ask what it was.
The names we choose to carry hold meaning, whether it’s our given name, chosen name, or nickname. I didn’t choose May myself, but it’s come to hold meaning for me anyways. May is the fairy you find upside down underneath a bush; she’s picking wildflowers in a springtime meadow, she’s throwing herself into a foot of fresh snow, she’s hoarding used light bulbs and old library calling cards in a drawer in case she needs them for an art project. It’s easy for me to assign aspects of myself to my two names, but maybe everything that makes me Madeleine makes me May as well.