- I was adopted at age 5 from Bulgaria by an American family.
- My parents americanized my name, and I’ve been trying for the past 18 years to correct them.
- I’ve come to understand the importance and significance of a name.
My brother sat across from me at a family dinner, sounding out the first syllable of my name. “It’s a hard ‘I’,” I reminded him, “not an ‘A’ a hard ‘I’ like ‘mirror’ as in, Mir-ella.” He laughed a little. A few people from around the table also laughed, including my father. I smiled. “I’m going to get it,” my brother said. “Please just know that I want to say it right.”
I am 36 years old and this year, it occurred to me that we have been having this same conversation, the one where I help various members of my family pronounce my name correctly, for over half of my life.
I was adopted as a kid
I was adopted into my family at age 5 from Bulgaria and although mine was an open adoption, this did not keep my name from becoming Americanized. From the beginning, my name was pronounced the way my parents preferred — Ma-rilla, like the character from the popular children’s book and eighties movie “Anne of Green Gables.” The rest of my family — brothers, aunts and cousins — all followed their lead.
I took my family’s pronunciation for granted for much of my childhood, at times forgetting that I was ever called anything else. Then, the summer before high school, I visited my Bulgarian godmother in Chicago and realized I preferred to be called by my name as it was intended.
It took a few years before I was able to approach my family with a request. In high school, I began to put an accent over the “I” — a meager change that didn’t last for long, but I was sick of hearing my name mispronounced by classmates and teachers, and thought the new punctuation might eliminate the need to correct them.
My parents balked when I brought home a name tag from the first week of school with the accentuated letter, though they never commented to me directly about how they felt.
College was a fresh start
By my first year of college, I made a fresh start with a new set of friends and dropped the accent. On visits home, I worked up the courage to offer a friendly correction to my three older brothers, their wives and my parents. I waited to see whether it would stick. Sadly, it did not.
The first 10 years, my brother and other family members joked as they made exaggerated attempts at enunciating my name as I had asked. A too-long “I”, a hard “I” misplaced in the second syllable rather than the first, entirely other vowels, replacing the first and oftentimes the second and third vowel sounds in my name — always in jest.
There was never any ill will intended, but as the years wore on, it became harder to ignore the persistent way my family labored to say my name right, that is, if they even labored at all. A few family members continued to mispronounce my name even after multiple attempts to correct them. They dismissed my request as if I was simply going through some kind of phase that would pass if they ignored it — or me — for long enough.
I understand the importance of names
Eighteen years later, I am a therapist. With my clients and others, I speak often about the role of identity, how knowing who we are helps us recognize where we end and where another person begins and thus, form healthy boundaries and relationships with others.
I know this intimately. I grew up, half-Iraqi, half-Bulgarian, in a white home and community, reaching adolescence in the months after 9/11, and in an effort to fit in spent much of my upbringing smoothing away the contours of anything that made me different.
I have come to understand the importance of a name as an extension of identity as I’ve reclaimed various parts of who I am. After I got married a few years ago and took my husband’s name, I also legally changed my name to include a surname I had from prior to my adoption — Stoyanova.
I do not harbor any resentment toward my brother, who I trust is doing his best to pronounce my name, or anyone else in my family. However, their reactions highlight the way we sometimes overlook the subtle harm we do to others who come from different backgrounds when we do not take the time to understand who they are.
My nieces and nephews are older now and I am especially sensitive to the message this sends them, as well as my toddler son. In the meantime, all I can do is continue to model to the next generation what it looks like to honor my identity as I hold out hope my family will come to eventually do the same.
