Writing, Writing, Writing.

I'm going to be doing a lot of writing. One of my writing exercises is a writing prompt and I'm going to try to publish them each day. Today's prompt: 

How Were You Named?

My name is Donna. There is a story I think I remember from my childhood, but in truth I don’t know if it is real or if I concocted it. The story goes that when I was born, the first child and a girl, my father wanted to name me Thomasina, which my mother nixed (thank goodness). She apparently wanted to name me Nicole, after my father, Nicholas, but he didn’t want that, saying that they would call me Nicki, which would be too confusing (that was HIS nickname). If this really happened, I suspect he wanted to reserve the name Nicholas (and Nicky) for the son he hoped to have one day. Being a good Italian man, he proposed Donna, which in Italian refers to “lady,” the Madonna being the exalted lady of the Catholic church. Again, I don't know if that is a true story but it's the one I'm sticking to.


Dad did get his Nicholas, but not until the second son. The first son was named Gregory, and the name Gregory doesn’t appear anywhere else in our family tree. I have three brothers; Gregory, Nicholas, and Paul and we soon shortened them to Greg, Nicko, and Paul. My father had a highly (to me) annoying habit of calling me Don, and when he would, I would say, “NA. DonNA.” He would occasionally call me Na because he knew it annoyed me. 


I hated being called Don because it was a boy’s name and I was a girl, the ONLY girl of the offspring of Nick and Irene. I didn’t even like the name Don for a boy and certainly didn’t want it as a nickname for myself. I have always discouraged people from using it as a nickname, though every once in a while someone will call me Don. Sometimes I ask them not to call me Don but if I don’t want to hurt their feelings, I don’t correct them.


I have always wanted a nickname but since the shortening of Donna led to Don, I couldn’t come up with one that was based on my name. When I went to college and met the other girls on my floor (Dravo 4 or D-4), I tried to have them call me DC, my initials, but that didn’t work. I find it a bit ironic that I'm married to Kenneth/Kenny/Ken and gave birth to Daniel/Danny/Dan and Caitlin/Caitie/Cait.


I have a memory, which again might be my imagination, of being told that my name was to be Donnamaria (one word) but that the person who filled out my birth certificate put Maria down as my middle name. If that is true, then Donna would be a nickname for Donnamaria. Yes, I am reaching.



I think I was named for a popular actress named Donna Reed, who starred in her own TV as Donna Stone, housewife extraordinaire who raised a son and daughter while being married to a pediatrician and performing wonderful feats of laundry and cooking. I wonder if the movie Pleasantville was a parody? The show ran from 1958 to 1966 and I believe that Donna was a popular name during those years. You certainly don’t find many young Donnas today. I looked up popular baby names for 1959 and Donna was #5 on the list behind Mary, Susan, Linda, and Karen. No Thomasina. Imagine that.