What’s In a Name? I Found Out in Fourth Grade

My fourth-grade teacher was a rather strict nun whose name I cannot remember. (I think she’d taken the name of two male saints—Sister James Thomas, or something of the sort.) There were forty-eight students in the class, and one of Sister’s first acts in the school year was to declare that she couldn’t have so many children with the same first names. She arbitrarily assigned full names and nicknames (a “Richard” and a “Dick,” for example) to simplify her life.

Among the girls, there were three Marys and three Theresas (there were really only two Theresas and one Teresa, but spelling was a distinction Sister didn’t make). Therefore, she decreed, I would be known as “Mary Theresa” to solve both name problems.

Technically, my name is “Mary Theresa.” My mother’s name was Mary, and I was named after her. My mother also liked the French saint, St. Therese of Lisieux, known as the Little Flower, a Carmelite nun who died of tuberculosis at age 24. My mother had wanted to name me “Theresa Marie,” but my father hadn’t liked his Aunt Marie, so he vetoed that possibility. Therefore, my birth certificate reads “Mary Theresa,” though I have been known from birth as “Theresa.”

Well, there were a variety of nicknames also, such as “TC,” but as soon as I was old enough to have an opinion, I insisted on “Theresa.”

Not Mary.

Not Terry.

Theresa.

And don’t pronounce it “Tree-suh.” It has three syllables—”Tuh-REE-suh.”

But my opinion did not outweigh Sister’s, and so in the fourth grade I was called “Mary Theresa” by teachers, classmates, and everyone else outside my family. I managed to stick to “Theresa” at home.

I could rant about the difficulty of going by one’s middle name, and maybe in another post I will. But today’s post is purely about the difficulty of having to use both my first and middle names.

Back in 1964-65 when I was in the fourth grade, there weren’t many computer forms to fill out, so the lack of sufficient spaces to include all the letters of both names was rarely an issue. There might have been one or two times on a standardized test when I had to blacken many more circles than my classmates, but I could handle that.

The real problem was on daily assignments. I had to write three words at the top of the page, while everyone else only had to write two. Over the course of the school year, that’s a lot of extra writing.

Our instructions were to write at the top of on every paper we turned in (1) the date on the left-hand side of the paper, (2) the letters J.M.J. in the middle (for Jesus, Mary, and Joseph—the names of the Holy Family, because our school was run by the Holy Names sisters), and (3) our name on the right-hand side. That’s a lot of extra writing I had to do.

Fourth grade was the first year we were permitted to use ballpoint pen for our homework assignments. Ink erasers did not work well in 1964, and the cheap pens that students used blotted a lot. Every word I wrote gave rise to the possibility of disaster. I can remember scrubbing with the ink eraser to correct a misspelling or delete a blot until the paper gave way to a hole, and I had to start all over.

If written assignments were bad, Art class was even worse. Finding room for my long name on Art assignments was often difficult. I remember one assignment that required us to incorporate our name into the design. We were supposed to write our name sideways in the middle of the paper in heavy crayon, fold the paper in half and transfer our name backward on the other half of the page—the result of the two mirror images of our name looked sort of like a bug. Then we colored in the two versions of our name to make it look more like a bug.

Try doing that with three words instead of two. I’m not sure how I did it, but I do remember thinking it wasn’t fair that I had to work so hard.

I survived the fourth grade, ink stains on my fingers, double name, and all.

The worst part of Sister’s decision to call me “Mary Theresa” was untraining my classmates the next year in fifth grade, when we had a much more laid-back lay teacher. But I persisted—I wanted my real name back.

When has your name caused you problems?