Leila Rose Petal

I have a tendency to want to correct people when I see them in error, whether they want me to or not. This is not always a good thing, particularly as sometimes people just need to be right - even when they’re wrong. Thanks to a phone discussion with The Mavis yesterday I think I’ve worked out where I got the tendency from.

It seems that both my parents remember my dad’s mother’s middle name as being Lelia (leel-ya), not Leila (Leel-la) as I had thought. The Mavis felt the need to convey this information to me when we rang to wish her happy birthday. With it came the tacit suggestion that, therefore, we are not in fact naming the baby after my grandmother.

This is not the first time I’ve had this sort of conversation with The Mavis. When we were discussing names for the munchkin who became Finn we were going to use Lily Maeve if he turned out to be a girl. Maeve was chosen as a nod to The Mavis, without actually using her name because, really, who would stick a child with Mavis in this day and age. We were in error that time too, apparently, as Maeve and Mavis are different names with different origins (Maeve is Irish, Mavis is Scottish and that would matter to The Mavis) and different meanings, so using Maeve would not have been naming the baby for The Mavis at all. Fortunately that baby turned out to be Finn and even then I thought The Mavis would never stop calling him Flynn and telling me that everyone would think he was Irish.

I don’t think any of this is malicious or bitchy. I do believe it all comes from a loving and well meaning place, perhaps even from a maternal urge to correct a child in error, but that doesn’t mean that there isn’t just a little spark of smug self satisfaction in there too. That warm sensation of being the one who is right. And that is annoying.

What is more annoying to me, though, is that Leila’s name is now a ‘thing’ that will need to be dealt with. Even ignoring the information completely will constitute a position which will need to be justified or defended. And if I’m going to have to do that I might as well dig out my copy of the family tree and find out for myself what my grandmother’s middle name really was and we can decide from there how we proceed. I just really wish I didn’t have to. Ignorance would have been quite nice in this instance.