I have been cleaning out my home computer files as it has really passed its use by date ( a bit like me some days) and I found this little piece I wrote in 1999... so in the spirit of recycling and being 100% environmentally friendly here it is!
What’s in a name
(or a Kate by any other name would be as sweet)
An observer piece by someone with multiple personality disorder
Have you ever wondered who you would be if you were not you? This is not a deep philosophical question merely one of those annoying thoughts that occasionally gets into your mind and just won’t budge. It may be due to a mid life crisis, but lately I have been wondering if my life would have turned out differently if I had a different name. Does our name define who we are to become, or do we become the name we are destined to be? I, like many, do not use the name I was given at birth and over the years I have been different versions of my name to different people.
This precedent was started early. My mother wanted me to be called Ann-Marie, and my father wanted me to be named after his mother, Kathleen. My mother exercised her perogative to naming rights as the “one who went through the pain and suffering of childbirth”, so my birth certificate was filled out as Ann-Marie. My father was given the task of posting said birth certificate and saw this as his opportunity to assert his male dominance, so with a dash of the pen he slipped a Kathleen in front of the Ann-Marie and thus it was that I became a Kathleen Anne-Marie. (I must at this juncture state how grateful I was that I was too young to remember the scene when the birth certificate arrived and my mother now found out that her daughter Ann-Marie was now a Kathleen. Needless to say this did not harbour well for marital bliss, although my parents went on to have two other children and as far as I know, there were no arguments over their names.)
So now I was Kathleen! It may have been due to my mother’s disappointment with my father changing my name but I was never Kathleen to her; I was Kate. On the other hand, to my father’s side of the family I was Kathleen. Imagine, dear reader, the pain of being two different people at such a tender age! Kate was a cheeky and vivacious child, while Kathleen was the quiet, good child. Kate was the girl who climbed trees, loved playing with the boys and was quite a sportswoman. While Kathleen, was a scholar, musician and writer. How these two totally different people managed to inhabit one person I cannot tell you, but it was certainly interesting at the time!
Over the years there have been battles between Kate and Kathleen for dominance, with neither ever becoming all powerful, when another personality emerged - Katie, and not just one Katie but two! There was kt who became an internet groupie and e-mail junkie and general geek grrl ( that is not a spelling or typo either!) who was last seen flying through cyber space and katie o’ banrock a sweet Irish lass. This is how she ko'b that it, was made her presence felt.
katie o’banrock (notice how she does not use upper case? That is because her parents were too poor to afford upper case letters) was imprisoned in a bottle of Banrock Station Cabernet Shiraz by a wicked leprechaun ( for no particular reason, other than he was having a bad day and she really pissed him off, you will have to wait for her autobiography to find out why!) and doomed to spend the rest of her days at the back of the shelf in the Bottle Shop. But, as fortune would have it Kate was at the bottle shop looking to purchase something for the big family gathering that was taking place the next day. She had heard her mother in law favoured a drop of the old Banrock Station and always one to please her guests she searched until she found some, and as luck would have it, there had been a rush on Banrock Station Cabernet Shiraz ( I think it must have been on a buy-one-get-a-dozen-free kind of thing) and so there was only one bottle left …………………………………….. yes! the one with katie o’banrock inside it.
I think we would have to say there must have be some cosmic intervention here, because the bottle of Banrock Station Cabernet Shiraz wasn’t opened at the big family gathering. Be grateful for small mercies, goodness knows what could have happened if katie o’banrock has been launched upon some poor unsuspecting person who had only the experience of being one person. But as luck would have it Kate sat down to enjoy a glass when all the guests had gone (Kathleen would never drink alone, and kt was too busy on the internet to think about drinking!) and as she consumed the (entire bottle) of Banrock Station a strange metamorphosis began to take place, she started talking in an Irish accent and memories of a place far away came to mind http://www.banrockstation.com.au/
(I suspect kt probably was in on this!) and katie o’banrock was free!
And so now dear reader, I live with all four of them, Kate, Kathleen, kt and katie o’banrock. It can get a bit crowded at times, and if you can imagine four women living together it does get a bit bitchy but imagine how boring my life might have been if I had been Ann-Maire!
The End.
© the 4 Ks 1999.
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