Shock! I Never Expected That!

Tweet

All of my life everyone called me Ann until the day I had to leave France and go to Hawaii. This was the biggest shock of my life. When I arrived at the airport I was given both of my passports to check-in and board the plane. At the customs check-in I gave them my French passport to leave. However, they asked me for my American passport so they could verify that I didn’t need a return ticket. When they handed me my ticket and boarding pass I heard them say have a nice flight Sidney. I immediately protested and told them they had the wrong person. Unfortunately, this wasn’t the case. I looked inside my passport and it said Sidney Ann LeFlore. I meet my parents outside of customs and immediately started asking them 1000 questions. It appears when I was born, I wasn’t born in France, but America. My father works for the UN and was away when my mom was pregnant with me. I was born 10 months and 10 days after my brother. Two months before my mother was to deliver me she headed to California to stay with her mother. I spent the first 3 months of my life living in California before returning home to France to live and meet my dad for the first time. At this time my grandmother and mom decided to change the name my dad had picked out for me if I was a girl. My father was furious when he found out that my mother and grandmother named me Sidney Ann LeFlore instead of Jennifer Lynn LeFlore. After that my father said it was done, but he refused and forbid anyone to call me Sidney. He said he wouldn’t have a little girl being called a boy’s name for the rest of her life. That was when they started to call me Ann. When I arrived in Hawaii and was registered for school the teacher introduced me as Sidney to the class. I had a major fight with the teacher and told her that my name was Ann and nobody called me Sidney. The school respected this and everyone was ordered to introduce me as Ann. My uncle was playing the radio in the car on the way to school one morning. For the first time I heard a song playing called “A Boy Named Sue” by Johnny Cash. After this I use to joke around with everyone about how it felt to have a boy’s name and not a girl’s name. I really related to this song at the time. For the next 5 years I was haunted by this name. It seemed that everyone that found out my first name was Sidney asked me the same question over and over again. “Did your dad want a boy when you were born?” I swore when I was old enough, I would legally remove that name off my records. The day I turned 18 years old I went to the court house in downtown San Diego and found out what I needed to do. Before I left America to go to Mexico for work I had my named changed. Now all my records only show my name as Ann LeFlore. It wasn’t bad enough to be ripped from my home and sent to a foreign country to learn a language. But on top of all this I had to leave with a boy’s name hanging over my head. I still to this day have no clue why my grandmother and mother had decided I needed this name. How do you feel about the name your parent’s gave you? I think if they had spelled my name differently or even called me Cynthia or anything else this would have been fine. But back then nobody had the name Sidney. However, today I see this name is becoming more popular with some people. Back then it was a joke to call your child Sidney, especially when she was a girl.