The Story Behind the Name

I have a super common name.

My name was #1 for the decade of the 80's and it spent many years as either the #1 or #2 spot between 1980 and 1990.

I hate this.

From the age group of roughly 25-35 there are a whole hell of a lot of Jessica's.

Of course my parents didn't know this would happen at the time.

There are not a lot of Jessica's very much older than me.

It was not a popular name before the late 1970s and I was born in 1981.

Luckily they had the wherewithal to make it unique in it's spelling if not in it's pronunciation.

Ok, that's not why there is only one 's' at all.

It had nothing to do with me and letting me have a common name with a unique spelling.

There's a story behind my name.

And I've always liked it.

My name does in fact have only one 's', Jesica is not a lame attempt to be anonymous, that's my real name and the real spelling.

The story goes like this.

I am the middle child of 3 girls.

All of our first names start with the letter J.

And have 6 letters.

See, if I was the first child maybe we would of all had 7 letters in our names ;-)

But no, 2nd child means somehow they had to make Jessica have 6 letters, so I lost an S.

But it gets better.

Our middle names all start with L.

And have 4 letters.

And when you put the initials together, JLB it stands for my parents names.

J is the first letter of my dad's first name.

L is the first letter of my mom's first name.

And B, well we all have the same last name, duh.

Had any of us been boys the letters would have stayed the same, but the numbers were going to be flip flopped, so the first boy name they had picked out and never got to use was JOEL.

Cute, no?

Common name I may have, but I have a story behind the unusual spelling of the very common name.  So when people ask me "why is there only one 's'?"  Which happens often because they always think it's just spelled wrong, I have a cute story to tell them.

And people are always impressed that there's actually a story.

I've thought long and hard about doing this with my own children.  But since we all have J names I didn't want to add any more to the mix, there's a LOT of J names in my family and D for my husband's name, well....I'm not a fan of very many D names.

In fact I can't think of a single D name, boy or girl that I would consider.

So, what's a girl to do?

I'd like my kid to have a story behind their name.  But you can't just INVENT a story.  Stories have to happen organically.

As you can see, we're still stumped when it comes to the name of our future little terror.  I say terror because I'm pretty sure god has a sense of humor and this kid is going to be a Leo...just to fuck with me.

And out of nowhere, I just now remember a dream I had last night.

I had a boy baby.  And we named him my maiden name as his first name.

That would totally solve all of our problems wouldn't it.

Hmmmm......did my story just happen?