April is the Cruelest Month?

My mother has always been a tad idealistic. She’s a sucker for multi-level marketing (a euphemism for pyramid schemes if you ask me—if there is a significant difference, please let me know) and when those are in short supply, she’s got a closet-full of fall-back entrepreneur plans. She’s been a seamstress since I can remember, probably since she can remember. She’s made wedding cakes and wedding dresses, taught cake decorating, worked in a hair salon, sold legal insurance, painted pottery, run a store in our front room (Becky’s Unique Boutique), and she’s always wanted to own a restaurant or bakery. Above all, she is a firm believer that she can do anything she puts her mind to, so long as she can keep her mind there long enough to do it.

In the case of my name, this belief held true. Three years before I was born, as the story is told, my mother decided that she wanted a baby girl born in April, named April Rose, and her mind was set on it. Knowing you were a planned baby is worse, in some ways, than knowing you were an accident, I think. My mother once told me that on the night of my conception, she and my dad were fighting, but she had a plan and she had to carry it through. I could have been spared that story. The doctors induced labor on April 1^st, April Fool’s Day, and I literally flipped. I was breech, and was born by cesarean the next day.

While my mother was healing from the surgery, my father was left to fill out the birth certificate, and a few days later I left the hospital as Mary Elizabeth Osborn. Her plan, so carefully undertaken, and successful up until the moment that the pen hit that paper, had been shattered. I can imagine the disgust she must have felt when she found out. What I can’t imagine is how my father didn’t know that I was supposed to be named April. If she had really been planning for three years, it doesn’t seem possible that she could have forgotten to mention the fact. Did they never discuss my name before my mom went into the hospital? Or, more abhorrent, did my father know and name me Mary anyway? My parents were divorced about three and a half years later, and I can’t help but think that this mishap, whether oversight or intentional insult, was an early indication of what was coming.

When they went to pick my sister, Lisa, up from Brownies later that week, the pre-pubescent girls gathered around me, prodding me with their sticky little fingers, and one of the girls inevitably asked my name. That’s when my mother finally burst into tears as she wailed, “Mary!”

Mary’s not a terrible name. I’ve known a Mary or two in my lifetime, and without exception I’ve found them to be more than passably pleasant. But I am not a Mary. After the Brownies outburst, my mom and dad went back to the hospital and changed the name on the birth certificate. Mom and Dad compromised, perhaps one of the last compromises in their failing marriage, and I now bear the name April Elizabeth Osborn.

I hated the name April as a kid—though not as much as I secretly, quietly disdained the name Mary. I hated that it’s the name of a month, and that the first thing most people ask when they learn my name is “Were you born in April?” and that the first thing they ask when they find out that I was, in fact, born in April is “Is that why your parents named you April?” I hated it when boys chanted “April is a fool!” every April first while I was in elementary school.

But the name’s grown on me. Twenty-plus years will do that for you. In my sophomore year of college, when I started speaking Spanish with one of my roommates, it was only natural for my name to become Abril, which flows better in Spanish than the English version. It was only after being called this for a year that I realized an old friend who had autographed a shirt for me once had made it out to Aprile, not misspelling my name, but translating it to Italian, his language of preference. My affection for my name, and by extension for my mother, has grown with my realization of its versatility.

According to an online encyclopedia (Wikipedia), “The derivation of the name (Latin Aprilis) is uncertain,” it could mean “to open,” alluding to springtime, or it could be derived from Aphrodite since it is traditional to name months after gods.

So I could be one who opens, or one who is open, to situations or people. By definition I cannot be closed-minded. I cannot dress in black too often, as this would go against the illusion to springtime, and I cannot be completely and utterly plain as my name is related to the goddess of love, lust, and beauty. But there is uncertainty in the derivation, so I could be all of the above, and if I were, would it be surprising? If I were a gothic girl of less than average beauty and singularly stubborn in my views, would anyone look twice? Would anyone look once? Or would they all look the other way? Would it all make more sense if my name were Mary?

I’m none of these. Or at least, I like to think that I’m not. I dress in gray more often than black, but pink, blue, and even green, all have a place in my closet. I won’t pretend to have the beauty of Aphrodite, but I do pride myself in my openness. But until I wrote this essay, I never associated that pride with my name, nor do I really now. Still, I can’t shake the feeling that if my mother had been a little less emotional, if she hadn’t cared quite so much, or if my father had been a little more stubborn, I might have turned out a completely different person. When friends hear this story for the first time, they screw up their faces and say “you don’t look anything like a Mary,” whatever that means. If the story were reversed, they would probably say the same thing about April, and I have to wonder whether Mary would have molded to me, or I to Mary. But at the end of the day, I’m just me.

(April 2008)