While my legal name is S. Kay Murphy (yes, “legal,” as in “court order legal”), my brother and sister, my nieces and nephews, and a couple of guys from my long ago past call me “Cher.” That’s not really my name; it’s a diminutive of my original first name—the name I no longer use.
I made the shift over to using my middle name when I went to college. I didn’t want to hear my professors use my original first name, and the registrar insisted that I couldn’t use my nickname. “Fine,” I told her, “I’ll be Kay from now on.” And so it has been.
I never asked anyone who called me “Cher” to make the switch. I simply started introducing myself to new people as Kay. It’s a good name, a solid single syllable with a strong hard consonant beginning. It’s also not gender specific, as it was originally a male name. (I learned this from my daughter when she gave my first grandchild “Kay” as his middle name. “Mom, Sir Kay was one of the first knights of the Round Table.”) And Kay can be spelled with one letter. (If we’re in email contact, and I love you, you’ve probably read a missive from me that’s signed thusly: Love, K. Conversely, once while I was getting a pizza, the young woman taking my order asked for my name. When I replied, she said, “How do you spell it?” “However you like,” I told her. “I just use the letter,” which only confused the poor thing.)
My parents had no reason to name me what they named me, as my mother explained when I was very young. I wasn’t given an old family name nor was I named after some famous person or beloved friend. “We just needed a girl’s name,” she told me. “I think it’s a saint’s name.” It’s not. I checked. It’s just…random.
I changed my original name because hearing it spoken makes me deeply sad. No one ever called me that except my father. My mother and my siblings called me Cher. But my father called me that name, and never with fondness or affection. Even as a very small child, I could hear the disdain in his voice. His resentment and outright dislike of me were evident whenever he spoke to me, and he generally only spoke to me in order to issue some command or reprimand. That’s what I associate that name with, someone speaking to me with hostility. Someone who should have been using terms of endearment. He might as well have been saying, “Hey, ugly!” or “Hey, stupid!”
I didn’t change my name because I thought S. Kay Murphy was a cool pen name (my first book, Total Preparation for Childbirth, was published under “Cher Randall,” the latter name being my married name at the time) or because I am pretentious or to be mysterious when people ask, “What does the S stand for?” And boy howdy, do people ask. I’ve been known to prevaricate in answer.
Solstice
Savannah
Serendipity
Searlait (Pronounced “sheer-lit,” this is actually an old Irish name comparable to “Charlotte” in English.)
What fascinates me is that some people can’t let it go. I’ve had colleagues attempt to look up my personnel file in order to get satisfaction, so that they could be the only person on campus with the knowledge of what the S stands for. Of course, had they been successful, all they would have found was my legal name, S. Kay Murphy.
Decades ago, when I first changed it, I would reveal the name if someone asked. What I learned the hard way was that if I told them what the S stood for, some folks felt compelled to call me that repeatedly, saying the dreaded name over and over again, insisting that it’s a fine name and that “there’s nothing wrong with it.”
No, there’s nothing wrong with the name. I’ve had friends with that name, and I have no trouble saying it.
But I am not that name. I am not the person my father perceived. I am not the disappointment, the shame he foisted on me. I am my own person, with a strong sense of my own agency and independence, and because I am, I can discard what is harmful to my psyche, and I can replace that toxic thing with something that better represents my true authentic self.
Thus I have done so.
Just…so you know.
