The phone rang just as I was about to click on an email from an old friend. “Have you read it?” she asked, her voice brimming with good news. “I can barely believe it. I’m practically in tears. It’s so wonderful, to think that after all our struggles –”
“Wait!” I laughed; her excitement was contagious. “I haven’t even opened your message yet!”
She breathed out happily. “It may sound small but for me it’s huge: My sister just sent me a note saying that my niece had her baby last night — and named her after me!”
“Gee, that’s lovely!”
“Oh, it’s more than lovely. It’s … indescribable. It’s like a circle being completed, like a broken thing being fixed. My niece and I have always been very fond of each other, but as you know things have been difficult between her mother and me –”
I did know. Relations between the two sisters had been strained ever since the second one arrived in the world three years after the first. Each woman remembered hurts and resentments dating back to their childhood, and, as is unhappily the case with some siblings, even decades later, after the deaths of their parents, the two still had not reached a point of amiable accommodation. Yet now here was one sister’s first grandchild, receiving the name of the other sister.
My friend continued, joyfully: “It never occurred to me that I would care so much about something like this. I never imagined it happening, but now that it has, it makes me feel chosen and loved and honored.”
“As bad as things have been between my sister and me,” she went on, “I hadn’t realized until now how much I want to be reconciled with her. Now I know. And all from the naming of a baby!”
After chatting a bit more, my friend said she needed to get off the phone so that she could fling open all her windows, air out the house, and in the joyful hope of family reconciliation, give the place a ferocious spring cleaning.
I went back to my desk, still smiling from our conversation, and clicked on her email.
The smile faded away. My chest felt suddenly hollow. My friend had made a mistake.
In her excitement, she had missed a crucial bit of punctuation. There was a colon between her name and the first name of the child (as in, “Miriam: Mary Rose was born this morning,” not “Miriam Mary Rose was born. …”)
Her sister had written her name in stiff salutation, not to indicate the name of the new baby. The infant’s name was not hers.
I didn’t want to do it, but I had to call her back. And after a few minutes, her voice lost its shakiness. The sound of tears faded. She’d already replied to her sister, but she would cover her confusion by sending a jaunty follow-up: “I can say I evidently need glasses.”
She expressed relief that she hadn’t already sent a baby blanket with the wrong name woven into it.
“Well,” she said sadly, “at last the house is aired out.”
Meghan Cox Gurdon’s column appears on Sunday and Thursday. She can be contacted at [email protected].
