Cathrin Vici Kiehm | + Follow Poet |
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No Name

No Name
by Cathrin Stuart

Do you know how it feels
when you say nine months you carried me,
but could think of no name?

Do you know how it feels
when you say you held me for the first time,
yet still you could think of no name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear how you breast fed me—
still, for me, there was no name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear you bathed me,
yet still there was no name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear you changed my diapers,
and still you could think of no name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear you handed me to your oldest child—
still not a thought for a name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear that I was four months old, called “the baby,”
because still you could not give me a name?

Do you know how it feels
to hear that you only picked the spelling of my name,
because you could not bear to give me a name?

Do you know how my heart breaks
each time you say that you love me,
because you never loved me enough to give me a name.
 
Backstory to the Poem
I one day asked my mother where the names Cathrin Vici came from. She told me that my father was confident that I was going to be a boy and he wanted to name me Victor, but I was born a girl. She never thought of any names just in case I was a girl and never bothered to think of one either during her whole pregnancy with me.

When I was born, I was called 'the baby' for 4 months because apparently neither my father nor mother had any interest in giving me a name. This also meant that my birth was not registered in the 24-hour period as required by law. Eventually, my father picked my names. Keeping with the Victor that he wanted to call me, he decided on 'Vicky,' but my mother chose 'Vici' instead. To her mind, the name Vicky was too common for her liking.

My father then chose 'Katherina,' which was the name of his adoptive mother’s mother. My mother did not like the spelling because of how Afrikaans people might pronounce it, so she used the spelling 'Cathrin,' removing all the e’s so that Afrikaans people could not change the name and pronounce it differently.

At the time of picking my names, when I was four months old, the family had decided to take a holiday trip to the Victoria Falls in then-Rhodesia, but they would have a problem crossing the border because I was not registered and they could possibly be seen to have been abducting me. So they had to come up with names very quickly to get a birth certificate. I am the only child in the family without family names.

Many years later, I found out that my father’s biological mother’s name was Katherina, but I was not named after her. She died when my father was 4 years old, so he had no real memories of her. My mother did seem to take great pleasure in telling me that they could not name me.

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