There’s no such thing as living up to your name. Take Oprah for example: she was supposed to be named Orpah, after a woman in the Bible, but people kept mispronouncing her name to the point where she just stuck with it. But if you google “Orpah,” you’re taken to a 3-paragraph Wikipedia article about a woman who may have been Goliath’s mother, and right at the top of the page there’s a notification that reads “not to be confused with Oprah.” 

My mother always wanted to name her daughter Elizabeth. My aunt on my dad’s side also wanted to name her daughter Elizabeth, but not unlike in Friends when Rachel guilts Monica into letting her use the name Emma even though Monica had called dibs on that name since they were teenagers, my mother laid the guilt on thick with Aunt Gayle. My aunt had 2 children already whereas I was the first, and it didn’t hurt that my mother had a two trimester head start on Aunt Gayle. Besides, if she had liked the name that much, she should have used it for her first daughter, Nicole. 

My parents have different versions of how this took place – my mother distinctly remembers sitting on our loden green couch, years before it was our loden green and crayola red and blue and purple couch, with my father 2 weeks before I was due, and he suggested the name Courtney, which is my mother’s maiden name. She accepted with equal parts appreciation and trepidation, as my father and my mother’s parents hadn’t really gotten along throughout their relationship. And when my parents told her parents they had named me Courtney instead of Elizabeth, my grandmother replied, “but that’s a LAST name.” 

So there I was, screaming, butt-naked, and officially not Elizabeth. According to my father he offered the name as an alternative as I was quote “coming down the chute,” unquote, and once I had arrived, all 7 pounds, 11 ounces, and 21 inches, he tossed the name Vegas out there and had the doctor hit me. They went against Vegas in the end, clearly, mostly to avoid the assumption that that’s where I had been conceived. 

“Courtney” ended up being the 22nd most popular baby name in the 1990s according to the Social Security Administration so suck on that, Grandma. I considered attributing that popularity to Courteney Cox, but the way she spells her name didn’t even crack the top 200. 

My parents celebrated Easter with my dad’s family the first year they were dating, and my mother was excited to tell her parents about it, not just because it was a new relationship, but compared to her childhood, my dad’s seemed like it was ripped from the pages of a Salinger novel. Here was this dark man from Manhattan who lived on a boat and had attended boarding school, dating a girl whose family rarely went so far as the Cedar Point amusement park and never let her play the games and win a prize. So when my mother told Grandma Fran that they had eaten bagels and lox for brunch, my grandmother felt compelled to ask, “Is he Jewish?” Because only a Jew from Manhattan with an Eastern European last name would eat lox on…Easter. 

Aunt Gayle ended up naming her last daughter Sarah, a solidly second-string name if you ask me, even though she knew six months in advance that my mother hadn’t gone with Elizabeth. My mother’s next child – a son – wasn’t the “Elizabeth” title holder either, so she had all the options in the world to choose from. Her list included basically every white mom name that sounded like the letter “Y” had just been invented, like Holden, Hayden, and Payne (which I think would have been a good fit, considering the size of his head alone). She thought that those names sounded auspicious, even regal; you had to be a certain kind of person to pull off a name like that, and she hoped her son would be that kind of person. My father was championing the name Cole, and while my mother was hesitant to use a derivative of “Nicholas,” her sister’s newborn son’s name, they both agreed to stick with the alliteration and liked the syllabic structure since “Walker Zelazny” seemed like a mouthful, and he was already destined to be the last in any alphabetical order. 

So when my little sister came around, the name Elizabeth was still up for grabs! But did my mother finally get her Elizabeth who she had hoped for for so long? Well by that point she had myself, Courtney Anne, and my brother, Cole Alexander, so according to her, she just couldn’t have an outlier like Elizabeth, because it wouldn’t be fair to my sister. Besides, she said – with three kids sharing the same initials, she could get a great deal on monogramming. So she was born Caitlynne, a portmanteau of Catherine and Lynn, to honor the middle names of her sister and my aunt Gayle. 

My family doesn’t really talk to the other Courtneys anymore. In fact, I don’t think I’ve heard from the people I’m named after in almost a decade, and I’m only 22. My parents left Illinois after my brother was born, but I know part of their decision to move away was because they wanted to get away. She and her sisters had all been adopted, and the names they were given at birth had all been changed: Geraldine, Eileen, and Doreen. Maybe my mother was trying to channel her sisters’ rhyming names through the alliteration with my siblings. Orphanages were being phased out in the U.S. when my mother was born, so I don’t know if she would have grown up in one of those spooky Catholic nunneries horror movies are set in had she not been adopted. As a person who was spanked a total of twice growing up, it’s challenging for me to draw the lines between a regular working-class Catholic childhood in Chicago in the 70s, and abuse. Having to wear a hand-me-down prom dress I can safely put in the “typical working-class childhood” category. Getting the snot kicked out of you for skimming off the Girl Scout profits falls under abuse. Having to pay rent to your own parents at 16 – I’ll let you guess how I feel about that. My mother left home at 18 to join the army, partly to help pay for college, and partly, I assume, to escape her family. She knew getting out of the south side of Chicago was the only way to build a new life for herself, but I’m glad she kept a piece of her history alive with me.

Clearly my parents went back and forth on their feelings about naming their children after family members. I’d like to think that after all these years, when my mother sees my name pop up on her phone, she only associates “Courtney” with me, her daughter who is, in her own words, “a little much for the Carolina league,” and has “well outperformed her siblings.” But on the off chance she equates my name with people who have slot machines in their basements, then we really shouldn’t shame those who name their children Apple. I guess the moral is, if you want to honor someone by naming your first born child after them, make sure it’s someone you really like.