For Nonfiction Class

"How is he? How is he?" My mother asked, panting with exhaustion from the wondrous miracle known as birth (which, as any pregnant mother-to-be will tell you, is not as miraculous when you're staring down over your enormous belly at this red-faced jelly creature that is coming out of you crying when, in fact, it's the one causing YOU all the pain).

"He?" The doctor inquires. "What do you mean 'he'? It's a girl!"

My mother and father both wept. Although I suppose my mother was probably weeping with joy over the fact that it was all over, and my father quite possibly was weeping over his terror of having to raise something he knew absolutely nothing about.

For nine long months, my mother had decided to keep the sex of her second baby a surprise. After having carried and given birth to my brother two years before, she had her maternal intuition that I was going to come out complete with my Xs and Ys. My grandmother had given her the needle test. This old wives tale suggests that if you hang a needle on a thread over the belly of a pregnant woman, the way it spins will denote the sex of the baby. Supposedly, if the needle swings in a circular motion, the baby will be a girl. If it swings to and fro like a pendulum, the sex is a boy. This particular time my grandmother performed the test, the needle chose both methods of movement, confounding both women entirely.

So there I was in my mother's arms, her beautiful baby girl. In the midst of her postpartum bliss, the nurse arrived carrying all the necessary paperwork to introduce a new life to the world.

"And how would you like your child's name spelled on the certificate?" she asked sweetly, pen poised for inscription.

My mother and father stared blankly at each other, as if the attendant had just revealed that they were having a pop quiz about parenting. Krystopher Aaron had been the intended name for the boy that was supposed to be me. But, God had altered me just a little bit more in the female direction, so they chose to alter the name as well.

"Uh. Kryston. K-R-Y-S-T-O-N," my mother spelled out.

"And the middle name?" The nurse asked.

Well now here was the kicker. She needed a first AND a middle name?

In my head, I imagine that the TV they have in the corners of hospital rooms suddenly flipped on to the next show on air. In the case of my birth, that show happened to be Family Ties. My mother will tell you that it was one of her favorite shows at the time, but I think my story adds a little flair to the whole thing. Elyse Keaton might have popped up on the screen, tossing her blond hair and wondering what to do about something Steven did.

"Elyse?" My mother said, her eyes somehow asking the nurse if this was the right answer to her question.

"Mmmkay, and how did you want that spelled?" The nurse asked, her inner monologue going on about how if you were too young to even know how to spell common names, you were too young to be having kids.

Here is where my mother's explanation of the story gets me every time. She claims that she's never seen the name 'Elyse' or 'Elise' or 'Alise' spelled out before. But I say that it's a pretty popular name to not have seen it in some place at some time before. Especially if she got it from a show like Family Ties!

"E-L-L-Y-C-E," my mother concludes. Her winging-it skills at their finest hour.

And thusly I was named. Never again would a teacher feel confident in their abilities to spell, nay, PRONOUNCE, any and all of their students' names again. There went my chances to collect personalized souvenirs from any gift shop in America. Many an hour would I dedicate to finding just the right amount of loops and swoops for my signature. Notes addressed to me by middle school boyfriends would have all sorts of wrong letters. Many of my family members spelled my name wrong on the birthday cards of the the first half of my life.


These days, when they take my order at Starbucks, I give them a pseudonym so I won't have to be subjected to the butchering of my namesake. I try not to go to the same Starbucks twice in the same time of day in any given week so that I have a chance to create new and mysterious identities for myself. I've chosen names from Zelda to Betsy to Margaret and Macy. There isn't a day that passes that people don't point to my name tag at work and say "Is it CRY-stuhn? How do you say that?"

Maybe I'm biased from having lived with the name my whole life, but I honestly don't think it's all THAT difficult to say. Who would name their child CRY-STUHN anyway? The people who venture this guess at the pronunciation of my name are the same ones whose children got names that were about as interesting as a cup of water with no ice in it. Names like Susan or Mary, John or James. These are the people who paint their entire house in Eggshell. The ones who's cooking knows two spices: Salt and Pepper. But if it's Casual Friday they might throw in a little parsley.

I'd like to say that my parents ended their adventurous ways of naming their poor, innocent children. However, years later my half sister would be born. Now, Kendall isn't all that conventional a name to begin with. But put a little of my father's Lopez spin on it, and the name became Kendyl.

Shouldn't you have to PAY to use Ys as liberally as he does? I mean, they're not even legitimate vowels. It's just a consonant with a vowel's moustache or something. He's gotten greedy with them in naming his children, and quite frankly, the man must be stopped. Thank goodness my stepmother stopped at one with him, otherwise who knows what sort of freak show names my hypothetical siblings might have ended up with. Veronica could just as easily have been Vyronyka. Hillary could have been maimed into reading Hyllaryye. The ugly possibilities are endless.

The long and windy (probably Y-shaped) road of my name has been a difficult one for the people that know me to get accustomed to, but it makes me happy that I can claim it as something different about me. There's no other Kryston in the world quite like this Kryston, and that makes me feel like I have some place on this planet carved out for just me.