My grandmother named me. Gwen. Not simply Gwen or short for something widely acknowledged, like Gweneth or Gweneviere; Gwenifer Talitha Conrad. Keeping my father’s name was the last nail in the coffin, so to speak. The playground was not a kind place to me as a child.
It was because of this, I suspect, I grew up despising the name she had given me. There was a phase somewhere between the Barbie years and my short-lived days of obsession with veterinary science that I paraded grandly around the house, refusing to reply unless properly addressed as Miss Lucille. That got old quickly enough when no one ever did and I found myself with no one to talk to. But still, I reasoned, the effect was there. I had staged my rebellion.
“You should wear it with pride,” she would chide me softly, gently, in the way that defused any snappish retort you might have had. Instead, my childish cheeks would puff out in indignance as I attempted to justify the motions to have it legally changed.
“It’s just so weird,” was the best I could do.
“It’s not weird. It suits you.”
“How can gibberish suit me?”
She paused. “Where did you learn a word like gibberish?”
“Oprah.”
Her thin, wrinkling lips pursed inwards. I could see her mentally weighing the benefits of an extended vocabulary against the pitfalls of daytime television. “It’s not gibberish,” she replied at last. “It’s the language of your ancestors.”
“My ancestors were Americans,” I huffed. She laughed, a big noise, chiming and silver and somehow foreign, echoing the sounds of people and places I didn’t yet know existed.
“Sweetheart, your ancestors are from Wales.”
“The sea mammals?”
Her smile pinched the gentle folds of her cheeks and lit her eyes with a warmth and affection I was lucky to witness. “The country. It’s all the way over by England. We came over to America when I was a teenager, sweetling. You’re a Welsh woman through and through.”
My nose flared distastefully as I thought this over. Someplace so far away – that was sort of interesting. Never would I admit to such fallacy, though, so I beat my curiosity down as best as I could with such tiny, childish fists. “So,” I began, trying my best to sound disinterested, “what’s it mean?”
She picked me up and nestled me in her lap, smoothing back my hair and smiling in conspiracy, preparing to reveal a fantastic secret. “White ghost,” she whispered.
So I was.