My parents were never married, and I share both of their names. I also share the name of the nurse who delivered me, and my father’s mother. This is what I’ve been told.

Meila is the name my mother gave me, and it was also the name of the nurse who supported her during my birth. If I remember correctly, my mother told me that the nurse’s kindness towards her moved her so much that she wanted to name me after her. She said that about one year ago.

When I was around eight years old, my mother told me a different story about my name. She told me that she originally wanted to name me Maliyah, but the name began getting more popular due to the president at the time. This memory feels true to me because until the time of writing this, I had never confirmed the name of Obama’s daughter or heard of it from anyone else. I don’t believe it would be possible for my mind to fabricate my mother’s response to my question of where my name came from. Yet years later, when I brought up the memory to her, she told me it wasn’t true, and I was instead named after a nurse.

I believe my mother was probably joking ten years ago when she told me she changed my name to Meila after Maliyah became popular, but I still believed it was true for a long time. And if she was joking about that, maybe I can’t fully believe the story she told me about the nurse.

My middle name comes from my father’s mother, Potram Armstrong. One year ago, I began digging into my ancestry on a website, and I found a profile of my grandmother. One day, while in the car with my father, I brought it up to him. I already knew before that his family and ancestry were important to him because they impacted his life drastically. My father confirmed what I already knew—I was named after my grandmother. But he began to tell me more about her. He told me how she was originally from Mississippi and how she had the opportunity to marry a wealthy Jewish man, but instead became entangled with multiple men who struggled financially later on. He reflected on how his life could have been so much different, and as a result, my life would have been too. I asked my father why his last name isn’t Armstrong and is instead Johnson, and he told me that he was given his father’s last name. My father only saw his father a few times in his life, I believe. He told me that he didn’t see him much, and the last time he did, he was either a young adult or an adult. Both my father’s mother and father died before I was born, so I never knew them. But I was always very close to my mother’s parents.

My Pop Pop’s last name was Atlee, and when my Nana married him, she took his last name. I’m assuming this because whenever anyone referred to her or when she signed a document, her name was always Cynthia Atlee instead of her maiden name. I looked into the ancestry of my grandparents as well and traced it back to the 1600s. What I found felt less like a story and more like an outline, leading me to what may have happened. There’s no concrete story that was told, but my interpretation of the trail of information I followed was that my sixth great-grandfather was a white man and married or maybe just happened to have a child with my sixth great-grandmother, who was black, and that’s how the black Atlee family began. I can’t know this for certain because there aren’t many records from the 1600s that have any more information than the vague summary of my sixth great-grandparent’s relationship.

So, my last name, Johnson-Atlee, comes from the disagreement between my parents on who and what they wanted me to represent. My mother wanted me to be kind and intelligent like the nurse; my father wanted me to have a piece of his mother, live the life that she couldn’t, and represent her name in a better way than she did; and both of my parents wanted me to carry the history and stories of our families and contribute to both of them meaningfully. I’m assuming all of this based on the stories they told me and the stories I found through the Ancestry website. My interpretation could be wrong because my memory is hazy at times, and not even the information relayed directly to me may be certain. But if I didn’t have this multi-perspective story constructed from what I was told and what I observed, I don’t believe I’d be the same person I am today. Knowing these stories subconsciously shapes my decisions and my perspective on my life. Without them, my own story would be drastically different. But what I don’t know about also drives my decisions and mindset. Despite the missing pieces, I feel confident in my belief that my name is a fitting representation of my history and my future.