A Rose by Any Other Name….

I am changing my name. Not the handy “the Mom” title by which I am known in cyberspace, but my real-life name. I have decided to let go and become someone new.

Not my whole name, just the middle one. Though if I were completely honest, I would change both my first and middle names. They don’t belong to me.

I have a half sister. A half sister with the exact same name. She is older. It was hers first.

It’s funny. I didn’t grow up with a sister. I never even knew she existed until 2 years after my parents separated. Then my father told me that he had had a child out of wedlock. She was given up for adoption. He wanted to find her. I helped him search.

I have always tried to make those around me happy, even at my own expense. I was 16. I adored my father. I helped him look. I prayed with all my might that he wouldn’t find or or that she wouldn’t want him. We were close, my father and I. Then we weren’t.

We had a falling out that had nothing to do with anyone but us, although other people kept stepping in and trying to help. Had we been left to work it out, it would have healed long ago. We weren’t, so it never has.

Then he found her. All by himself, he found his other, older, much wished for daughter. And she had my name, or rather I have hers. He swears it was coincidental. I have my doubts, but it doesn’t really matter. He called her by my nickname until everyone got confused and then he called me by my whole name and her by my nickname. My name has already changed once.

At the time he found her, he said to my brother that it was so convenient that our names were the same “Rebecca Lynn” and “Rebecca Lynn”. It was like a puzzle he said, he could remove me (who was giving him trouble) and drop her into my place and he wouldn’t even have to rewrite his Will.

I’m sure she’s a lovely person. I hear great and good things about her. I have no desire to know her. She is a constant reminder to me that I have been replaced. That the father I took of when he needed me has chosen to put someone in my place “like a replacement piece in a puzzle.” I’m sure she’s a lovely person, but there are lots of lovely people in this world, and I don’t have to be friends with all of them.

I’m changing my name. It’s my own personal Declaration of Independence. I am not the consolation prize, or the duplicate or the also ran. I am fabulous, and funny, and completely wonderful, and I deserve to have my own name.