Guest blogger Dionne Ford swore she’d never do what her parents did: give all her kids names starting with the same letter. And then she discovered the up side of coming from a family with a unified name theme.
When I was a kid, I hated my name, not just because it rhymed with peon and my teachers couldn’t pronounce it, but because it made me an amorphous indistinguishable entity from my siblings. We are all Ds; Debra, Diana, Derick, Daniel and Dionne. And if that wasn’t enough, we have matching middle initials – Js for the oldest boy and girl, Ls for the rest of us.
Tongue-tied at almost every meal just asking one of us to pass the salt, my parents often resorted to addressing each of us by D. I grew up thinking my parents couldn’t remember my name.
I swore I’d never play such a cruel joke on my own kids.
