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 April 4th was my birthday. My mom told me how I was named. It involves an old wives tale. Back in the day, it was thought that of the two fallopian tubes of a woman's uterus, one was designated for boys and the other one produced girls. If a woman was missing a fallopian tube then all she could produce would be either all boys or all girls depending on the surviving tube.
Here are the four kids my mother birthed (in order of appearance); Larry, Marcia, Sandy, Doug. After Marcia was born, mom had some kind of partial hysterectomy which took out one of the fallopian tubes. Well, the wisdom of the day then said that whichever baby you had next would be all you could produce from then on. (Are you still with me?)
Well, Sandy came next. So in mom and dad's thinking, as well as everyone else around, they were going to have girls from there on out. Mom got pregnant again. Of course it would be a girl, and her name would be Robin.
April 4th came around and out came…um...Robin? Robin had a thing between her legs. How weird. And to further confuse the moment, the doctor oddly announced it was a boy. After some bewilderment and a bit of scrambling around, the pink blanket was put away and a blue one was found. Nothing like starting out life with everyone standing around gawking in amazement at your thingee.
So this is the story of how I wasn't named Robin. I asked Mom where "Doug" came from. She scrunched her face up and said, "Well, I don't know. We just had to come up with a name fast." In all their confusion over my sex, I'm just glad they didn’t get rattled and spell it with an "n" instead of a "u". My middle name, by the way, is the very unimaginative "Lee." I think that might have been the sound Mom made when I came out. I do have a big head.
We live up to the names and labels we are given in life. Everybody knows this. It's like the time I had to tell a guy, who had the build of Tweedle-Dee and worked at one of the stores I supervised in a former life, that he stunk and needed to bath. This had been an ongoing problem and the crew in their collective beneficence nicknamed him"Stinky" or in Native American tradition, "Smells Like Ass." He stunk the rest of his time with us, which was mercifully short.
"Douglas" is Gaelic for "one who comes from black water." Awesome, makes me feel like some primordial creature emerging from a tar-pit blinking into the bright sunlight for the first time. And I find this next tidbit especially interesting considering my story. Douglas was formerly used as a girl's name in English during the 17th and 18th centuries, but is now considered to be exclusively masculine (thank God for that).
So I try to live up to my label. First and foremost, I try to be masculine. Then I guess I head for the light. Something like that. Nice thought anyway.
I spent a summer in Europe during high school. One of the families I stayed with in the Netherlands kept putting an "h" on the end of my name as though you pronounced it “Duh-guh.” When it came to packing our lunches, I was a bit taken back when the mom handed me a brown paper bag marked "Dough". Gee, everybody else got a nice sandwich.
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