The origination of a name

As I've just made this blog, I have yet to decide how private or public I want it to be. However, I have made the conscious decision to leave my name out of it for now. I imagine, as I become inclined to share this with friends, fam or strangers, the possibility of keeping my name out of this will become harder. However, as I sometimes write to myself in the third person, I need to call myself something. I'm gonna go with Dulciña. It's significant to me, I've been called it before, but not by enough people to make it mainstream. I like that. And it has a tilde, which is awesome.

Now, how did the blog end up with the name "That'sNotMyNameGrandma"? The name came to me in the middle of night when I should have been asleep but instead was overthinking. I knew I couldn't sleep without registering it, so I got out of bed, walked to computer and registered it and it felt right. This has been a constant refrain of mine for the last couple of years. Anyone with friends or family with Alzheimer's know that often times the person, or in this case my grandmother, will start to forget/confuse names. For whatever reason, my name was one of the very first to go. Mind you, I've lived with my grandmother for my entire life minus a couple of years when I moved out and 8 years for college/high school when I was away for the school year. For the past almost 20 years, I've shared a room with my grandmother. So you can imagine my shock when she started calling me Bibby.

I've since learned that Bibby was the name of my grandmother's niece, a woman who is at least 30 years older than me, lives in another country and lived with my grandmother for a couple of years more that 40-50 years ago. And yet I'm her. And when I say that's not my name, she tells me that she's confusing my name with one my sisters. Only one issue. I have no sisters. Bibby does.

This was probably the first time i started thinking about how the mind deteriorates in both predictable and unpredictable ways. If I'm Bibby, then I must have sisters, and in response my grandmother will then call my mother, her own daughter, by a different name. Yes, you guessed it. My mom becomes Bibby's (dead) mother. My grandmother once sent a letter to my cousin in Jamaica. In it, she told him that someone he had never heard of before had sent him a present. I later had to explain to my young cousin that it was my mom not some weird woman who sent the present. Once again she had to referred to my mother by Bibby's mother name.

Anyone who knows me well will tell you I LOVE my name. It is often mispronounced and I often have to correct people, but I truly love my name. And all the Alzheimer's literature will tell you to just go with the flow if nothing is harming the patient. In most other ways, I can overcome. Except this one. It's a failing, I admit it. But maybe I feel like someone else is getting credit for my efforts, and that strikes me as unfair. Especially when I'm being woken up at 2am, 4am, and 5:25am with the question "Bibby, what time of the day is it?"

And that's when I answer, groggy, in the dark, and barely aware of what's going on "That's not my name Grandma...and it's nighttime, you can go back to sleep."