the story of rose

when i was a little girl of 6 my sister was born and my mama named her heidi with the middle name of rose. she was named after my granny, mable rose, my mother's mother.  i said mama, why don't i have a middle name, huh? why don't i? so mama said, you can have the middle name rose, too. all growing up i used rose as my middle name.  mrs. gibbons, my neighbor who - God bless her -  took me to church as a little girl, still to this day calls me petunia rose!! even though i was already six when mama gave me the middle name, i didn't remember this story so until i got married and moved to mississippi i never knew rose wasn't my real name. never.......until......

at some point i had to get my birth certificate for something and for the first time i realized that my name isn't really ROSE. all i had was just a plain old first name.  i was quite shocked, asked my mother about it and she told me the story above of how i came to be called with a first and middle name.  all my other siblings had first and middle names so the mystery just continued and my mama had no real satisfactory explanation for it! 

several years ago my sister went to mexico with her family on vacation and needed her birth certificate for that trip and lo and behold! her name isn't really ROSE either! she only had one name as well! what?? my mother's explanation:  she took baby sis to meet granny and said something like: this is heidi rose named after you, not realizing it would stick? 

before heidi realized she wasn't a true rose, i had a daughter. i wanted so badly to name her hannah rose but.....for some odd reason (i know, i'm without excuse) it just didn't sound right and so i gave her a different middle name. (((at least i gave her a middle name, do i get any credit for that?))). and so i continued the middle name drama since it wasn't rose.  but as she grew up, she knew her name was supposed to be rose, it just was.  for graduation from high school, to surprise me, she had her name printed in the bulletin and her name was read as she received her diploma: hannah christine rose!! now that was creative and fun....and as it should have been!

finally, when my sis had her daughter, she named her victoria rose - AHHHH -  and we got our first and only real official on-the-birth-certificate rose in the family, the first since our granny, mable rose.....until.....last but not least......

my brother married a beautiful girl from israel. all the way from israel, this is no lie. he met her in taiwan (this is no lie either) where he was there making money translating books from chinese into english and she was working on her master's thesis.  her name is vered and the translation of her name???????????? ROSE.  she is a twin and her twin's name? iris.  

aren't some things just meant to be? 'course i don't know what that says about all of us who weren't named rose officially.  but truly, no matter what's on our birth certificates we're all roses. because

what's in a name?

that which we call a rose

by any other name would smell as sweet!

shakespeare's "romeo and juliet" 1594

weren't you waiting for that?