Getting the Pretty Back

by Molly Ringwald

  My daughter even has a different name when we are in Greece.

  At some point in our courtship, my husband (then boyfriend) told me about the Greek custom of naming the firstborn child after the father’s parents. Names stay in the family for generations. Cousins all share the same names. It all seems a bit confusing and strange to someone of my Anglo-Saxon background. (The closest we have is the Jr./Sr. title, but girls aren’t often named after family members, at least not as an obligation.) When I became pregnant and found out it was a girl, there came the sinking realization that I was expected to name her after my mother-in-law. Not to say that I don’t love my mother-in-law, I do. She is a magnificent woman, smart as a whip, hardworking, a phenomenal cook, and full of love for her family. And she raised the person I chose to love, which alone is enough for me. But my whole life I dreamed about having a child and naming that child. I started collecting possible name combinations when I was still a child; how could I just give all that up and name my child based on a tradition from a culture in which I wasn’t even raised?

  I informed my husband that I had a problem with the name thing, and he was silent. I presented my reasons for my refusal. He listened, but I could tell that it was going to be a problem.

  “What’s the matter?” I asked, knowing the answer.

  “I just don’t know how to tell my mom. It’s just so…disrespectful,” he said. “It’s like a slap in the face.”

  “It isn’t fair,” I wailed to my mother.

  “It’s just a name,” my mother said

  “Just a name? How can you say that? You named all of your kids. I didn’t see you naming any of us after Grandma Aloha.” I actually had a Grandma Aloha—my father’s mother. She wasn’t Hawaiian, nor did she live in Hawaii. Apparently her mother listened to some radio station while she was pregnant and liked the sound of the word aloha. Another daughter was christened Coral. (Strangely, my other grandmother lived in Hawaii. But her name was Edith.)

  “Well, it’s different,” my mother reminded me. “It isn’t a part of our culture. It didn’t matter to your father, or his family. Not like it does to yours.”

  PARENTING ADVICE TO IGNORE (EVEN IF IT’S FROM YOUR OWN MOM)

  Our friends recently got pregnant and, upon showing up for dinner, explained that they were exhausted. “How can you be exhausted before having kids?” I asked. They explained, that they had just come from a six-hour new parent seminar. Yes, you read that right, six hours. Sure, parenting can be tough at times, but you don’t need six hours to learn how to change their diapers and make them hate you when they’re teenagers. In my experience as a new parent, I was inundated with advice, some of it welcome, some of it…not so much.

  Following is the advice I’m glad I ignored.

  To spare the feelings of friends and family, I’ve refrained from naming the contributors (you too, Mom).

  WORST ADVICE

  Let them “cry it out.”

  Don’t let your baby cry—ever.

  If you hold a newborn too much, you’ll spoil him.

  Don’t ever let them suck their thumb—it’ll ruin their teeth.

  Assume all behavior is diet related (Grumpy? Give ’em soy! Hyperactive? Take away gluten!).

  I pouted. “But I’m not Greek!”

  “No, but you love one,” she reminded me.

  “Why don’t you compromise?” my mother suggested. “Give her the Greek name as a middle name.”

  So it was decided. We named her Mathilda Ereni. But for one month out of the year, her name is just Ereni.

  It was presented to the in-laws as a choice to give our child an American name and a Greek name. When they lived in the States, everyone in their family had an Americanized version of their Greek name. Stylianos became Steve, Irini became Irene, and so on; consequently, this compromise was accepted with little fanfare. Her American name would be Mathilda, and her Greek name Ereni. But somewhere in the back of my mind, there was that little bit of expectation. (You know what I’m talking about. It’s like meeting a guy who loves football and thinking, Well, when he really falls in love with me, he’ll decide that going to the theater is so much more interesting…) After a while, I reasoned, they would just accept that her name is really Mathilda. That’s the name she answers to. And look at her! She is clearly a Mathilda.

  But guess what? My in-laws refuse to call her anything but “Ereni.” Ereni or the diminutive “Erenoula” (the Greek version of “Little Irene”). There is a reason why the Acropolis is still standing. Greek culture was built to last.

  I unwrapped her christening gifts and found diamond-studded “Ereni” necklaces. Bibs, Onesies, everything emblazoned with Ereni. For this one month out of the year, it felt somehow like my daughter was taken away from me. I know this is ridiculous, but it felt to me that this should be one of the inalienable rites of motherhood. The right to name your own child, and to have everyone else in the world acknowledge your choice. Your children grow up and make their own decisions about their identity soon enough. Is it so wrong to want to guard that right when you have it? “Don’t be selfish,” the mature voice would scold me. “Get over it.” And then the other voice: “This might be the only child you ever have! How can you be such a doormat? If you can’t even stand up for her name, how are you going to stand up to anything for her?”

  I finally lost it one night as my husband and I were driving around a Greek beach town, looking for an Internet phone card. (The remote location still hasn’t heard of WiFi.) I dissolved into tears and screamed out my frustration and feelings at being steamrolled by the culture.

  “Why do they insist on calling her by a name that isn’t hers? Can’t they see? Can’t they understand that it’s important to me?”

  “No,” he said. “I don’t think that they understand how important it is to you. I don’t think that I understood how important it was to you. I thought that we…” He trailed off, at a loss.

  We drove around in silence, and then cruised by the outdoor movie theater to see what was playing. (Incidentally, you haven’t lived until you have experienced Mamma Mia! with a bunch of chain-smoking Greek Abba fans.)

  On the way home, my husband was the first to speak.

  “I’ll talk to my mom. I’ll tell her that she has to be called Mathilda.”

  A wave of relief passed over me. I felt like a mosquito bite that was just agonizing me suddenly vanished. And then, concern.

  “But wait! What will you say? She’ll know it’s me!”

  “No, I promise. I won’t make it sound like you. I wouldn’t do that. I’ll say it’s for Mathilda…that it’s confusing for her. Don’t worry.”

  He smiled at me, and in that smile I remembered all of the reasons why I married the guy. This is a man who is very close to his mom but who would still stand up for me. The best of both worlds.

  “OK,” I said. “Thanks. I want to…give me the night to think about it. Do me a favor and just let me think about it some more.”

  Just knowing that he would take my side, that he would hear me out and not tell me that I was wrong, or neurotic, or unfair, made my feelings…not change exactly, but it did feel like the pressure cooker that had become my head just lost some of its steam.

  The next day we all left the house for our afternoon beach romp. Mathilda and I splashed around in the children’s tide pool and tried to catch little fish with leftover pita and a sand pail, but had much more success with the sand crabs. She showed off her impressive bucket of sand crabs to a little posse of Greek girls.

  “Tell them my name, Mommy.”

  “You tell them,” I told her “Don’t be shy.”

  Mathilda looked at them and cocked her head to one side shyly.

  “Ereni,” she said. With a perfect Greek accent.

  And then she chased the girls shrieking into the water with her bucket full of sand crabs.

  At that moment I realized the obvious. I wasn’t taking anything away from my daughter by letting her have this oth
er identity for one month out of the year. She was receiving the gift of another culture and the love of a few very important people from that culture. Our children benefit not only from all of the love that we give them but also from all the love that they get from everyone else in the world—the more the better. I feel like I’m the best mother that I can be when I allow other people to love my daughter in their way. It’s not always easy. But I’m learning all the time what it means to be a mother.

  A while later I sat next to my mother-in-law at a dinner party in Athens. Friends of the host were making polite conversation with us (in English, since I have a long way to go until I have perfected my Greek). They inquired about my daughter, her granddaughter, and then the inevitable question, “What’s her name?” I turned to my mother-in-law and, unbelievably, heard her start to say “Mathil—”

  Could my husband have said something, or did she just intuit something from me?

  “Ereni,” I interrupted. “Her name is Ereni. She’s named for her Yia Yia.”

  The look on my mother-in-law’s face is one that I won’t soon forget. Relief. Gratitude. Pride. Love.

  In the same week, I managed to feel like a good mother and daughter. Sometimes, I realized, it’s the same thing.

  As parents we are always looking for the right thing to do. When I was pregnant, my husband and I had lengthy conversations imagining every possible situation and how we would handle it. We thought we had a pretty good handle on it and felt hopeful and confident about embarking upon our new roles as parents. I remember being in the ICU when Mathilda was a baby. She was born early, at thirty-five weeks, and as a result spent a week in the hospital while they monitored her “bilirubin” level. Having never even heard of bilirubin (a brownish yellow substance found in bile, produced when the liver breaks down old red blood cells; since premature babies don’t have livers functioning at full capacity yet, too much bilirubin can cause jaundice—as well as brain damage, hearing loss, and all sorts of other undesirable things), my husband and I trekked back and forth to the hospital in the snow, bemoaning bilirubin. We started referring to him as “Billy” and then “Billy the ICU bully.”

  One night we were sitting in the Neonatal ICU, holding her. It was three o’clock in the morning. The room was dark save for the warm blue glow emanating from the other incubators. We stared at her tiny face in wonder and cooed at her. How much we loved her, how perfect she was. A nurse turned and said, “Just wait till she’s thirteen years old and she won’t speak to you because you won’t let her wear a pair of jeans that say Bootylicious on the seat.” We looked at each other in shock and then laughed. Would we be that parent? Impossible! Not us. Not our little angel.

  Five years later, I am surprised at the ways she has found to test me. She isn’t even a teenager yet! I have actually found myself negotiating, and when that didn’t work, literally begging my daughter to wear a pair of overpriced patent leather boots I bought for her. Other times I have resorted to the desperate invention of an “Imaginary Girl” who will give hugs and kisses when my own daughter withholds. This, by the way, works like magic. It basically creates a dynamic of sibling rivalry when there are no siblings. (You don’t love me? Well, Imaginary Girl thinks I’m swell…) My husband, though initially amused, suggested that it might not be the healthiest impulse to foster in our child, and I had to agree with him. Soon I decided to faze her out, explaining to my daughter that Imaginary Girl was gone.

  “Where did she go?” Mathilda asked me.

  I hadn’t thought about that.

  “Um, she went back to her imaginary home…to her imaginary mommy and daddy.”

  “Oh,” Mathilda said. Then after a moment, “Does she have an imaginary cat?” Mathilda has an obsession with cats. Before Imaginary Girl was retired, Mathilda was careful to make sure that Imaginary Girl wasn’t somehow one-upping her, and scoring a pet before she did.

  “No. Imaginary Girl is waiting to get a cat, just like you are.”

  “Oh,” Mathilda said. “Then that’s OK.”

  There was a few months’ reprieve from Imaginary Girl. I felt incredibly sheepish about my invention, and for a while whenever I expressed a parental opinion to my husband I got an eyebrow raise and the two words. Imaginary Girl. Fair enough.

  Then one day, to our surprise, Mathilda brought her back for a return engagement.

  “One whole inch longer than Imaginary Girl,” Mathilda remarked as she brushed her own hair.

  “I wouldn’t know,” I told her. “Imaginary Girl left, remember?”

  “Yeah, but she came back,” she insisted.

  “I don’t know about that…”

  My reluctance caused Mathilda to put down the hairbrush. With an exasperated sigh, she turned to face me.

  “She’s pretend, Mommy. You know that, right?”

  She does have a remarkable grasp of what is real and what isn’t. It made me realize that I wasn’t getting away with anything. She knew all along. She just enjoyed the play of it. It tickled her funny bone.

  It has since been determined that Mathilda rides her bike better, swims faster, and sings prettier than Imaginary Girl. She is smarter, can eat more peas, and says thank you more often. In fact, it has been generally decided that Mathilda is all around better in every way than poor little Imaginary Girl. When I’m asked whom I love more, her or the Imaginary Girl, I tell her that I love her and just how much. And then I sing, “Ain’t nothing like the real thing, baby…”

  BEST MOM MOMENTS

  I asked my friends to remember the best things their mothers ever did for them. As surprising as the range of experiences was, equally surprising were the power and vividness of these memories. Reading this, it’s a tribute to all mothers and makes you realize that everything you do as a mother counts, and will be remembered.

  ILANA (ACTRESS): To turn over a new leaf. Whenever we got into conflict, we would sit down after we talked it through and take a leaf and turn it over, which was the symbol of starting over, with a new beginning, and learning from what just happened.

  JULIA (COSTUME DESIGNER): Made sure my brothers and I had a delicious meal together every night. I can’t think of a meal growing up that was not cooked with love.

  SANDY (ACTRESS): My mom told me never to wear mauve or olive green. They’re not my colors.

  SARAH (MUSIC INDUSTRY EXEC): She told me right before she died (I was in my early twenties) that the best thing she did was raise kids who were going to have a great and happy life together, even knowing how desperately they’d miss her and even if she couldn’t be there to share it day by day.

  MARISA (EDITOR): Told me repeatedly that life isn’t fair.

  JAMES (ARCHITECT, WRITER): My mother was a remarkable woman, an urbane and sophisticated New Yorker with, among other things, a strong and distinctive fashion sense. When she would appear for my elementary school parent-teacher conferences in, say, a poncho outfit with matching wool muffler—a superbly stylish mid-sixties look—it drove me crazy. “Why can’t you look like the other mothers?” I’d complain. She would express some concern, but then proceed to go on her way, following her instincts about clothing as well as many things…a confident and fearless attitude that, years later, I realized was perhaps her greatest gift to me.

  ELIZABETH (STUDENT): She taught me the importance and beauty of giving people room to be who they are. That, and how to hand-fold a towel, back-comb my hair, moonwalk like Michael Jackson, and lead a mean campfire song.

  PANIO (WRITER): When I was four, my mother let me walk to preschool by myself every morning. Strutting along the sidewalk of our tiny town of Shelburne Falls, passing storefronts while swinging my red Snoopy lunch box, I felt unbelievably proud and grown-up. It was a stunning counterpoint to preschool where, speaking almost no English, I would hide by the aquarium. After I became a father and began taking my daughter to preschool, I called up my mother and asked, “Are you completely crazy? You let me walk to school by myself! I was four years old!” “Of cours
e I didn’t let you,” she told me.” I kept about twenty feet behind you—close enough to make sure you were safe, but far enough so that you didn’t know I was there and would feel like a big kid.”

  TODD (WRITER): She always made me feel like I’d get a second chance if I made a mistake.

  COLIN (DANCER, ACTOR, SINGER): The embrace of my mom. My favorite place to this day is probably in the arms of my mother.

  Chapter Nine

  WHAT DID YOU WANT TO BE WHEN YOU GREW UP?

  IT’S ALL TOO EASY TO LOSE SIGHT OF WHAT’S IMPORTANT TO US. Life seems particularly skilled at throwing distractions, obstacles, and outright roadblocks in our path. One of the hardest parts of dealing with the inevitable complexities of managing to pursue what inspires and fulfills us is that much of the time we get in our own way. I realize I’m veering dangerously into self-help book territory here, and I want to explicitly refrain from anything like that. I don’t know how you should live your life and wouldn’t presume to tell you. All I know is that based on my experiences, and the experiences of my friends and family, what seems to be a recurring theme is the importance of staying true to ourselves. Once you start living your life entirely for someone or something else—whether it’s familial, social, or professional responsibilities wholly motivating you—then you find yourself in a life that doesn’t seem to belong to you. Before you get to an existential crisis that feels like you’ve been plunked down in a Talking Heads song—“And you may ask yourself / Where does that highway go?”—stop and look at where you are and whether it’s where you want to be. How far away are you from the original dreams you had when you were younger? Did you give up those dreams because you changed your mind, or did you give up because life pulled you away and you couldn’t find your way back?