By Mina C.

Mina, Marina, Mei Li. My names are beautiful, gem, wisdom. They are fish, the ocean, the place where people dock their boats. My name is fine and small - delicate like a flower, and smooth like a knife. I was named after a parent’s friend’s wife. I don’t remember if I met her when she was alive. She was kind and beautiful I heard, and she was the ocean too. Lapping the shore, and out too soon like the tide. I don’t want to go out like the waves on the beach, fading over the water and seafoam. I want to leave an imprint on the world like footprints in the cement sidewalk. I like my names, I like their meaning. I like their differences, their contradictions. If I chose another, something else to describe myself by, I might choose Rain or Ember or Finch. The lights of embers stay imprinted in your mind long after the fire has burned out.

Another Jennifer by Mrs. Ashley

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My name is Jennifer, and from the years 1970 to 1984 is was the most popular American-born girl name.  I grew up with at least one, if not two or three other Jennifers in my class.  Along my hallway dorm of my sophomore year, there were five of us. 

In kindergarten, I shortened my name.  Apparently, as my mom says, my papers started coming home with JENNI scrawled across the top.  When learning to write, an eight-letter first name is equivalent to solving a geometric theorem.   I simply dropped the FER and have been Jenni ever since. I have met many other derivations of Jennifer over the years.  We all have the same mission to unique-ify our rather common name.  I have met Jens, Jenns, Jennys, Jennies, Jennas, and true Jennifers.  I am not sure what my parents were thinking when they named me Jennifer.  They are far from traditional; I grew up eating tofu and homemade peanut butter and driving around in our Volkswagon Bus with the named “Odyssey” written on the back as the CB handle.  My sister is named the more original Lisbeth, but then she has spent her whole life correctly people on her name.  “No, not Elizabeth, but Lisbeth. No, not Lisabeth, but Lisbeth.”

When I dream of a new name, I think of something more heroic, such as Guinevere or Geneviève.  But, alas, I am a Jennifer.