As the first child of a second marriage, I always knew my worth. My name reflected that. I had the most pictures, the newest clothes, and a suffocating amount of attention. My name was a reminder of the day my parents met—  aboard a ten-hour journey on a United Airlines aircraft from London to San Francisco. 

A doctor, middle-aged divorcé, and first-class passenger caught the eye of a newly single flight attendant, twenty years his junior. She possessed an intriguing aura of shyness and wisdom that he couldn’t quite place. It was an uncommon feeling, as he was pretty observant of others’ behaviors.   

They spoke for nine of the ten hours they were in the air. After she revealed that she enjoyed learning to mountain bike on the rocky terrain of Moab Utah with her ex-boyfriend, the doctor invited her to the birthplace of mountain biking and the county in which he resided, Marin. 

The flight attendant had a two-day layover, and when she arrived at her hotel one of her coworkers, Mia, asked her how the flight was. She told her that she met a passenger, a doctor, in a blush-colored button-down shirt who gave her his number, but that she thought nothing of it and probably wouldn’t call him. 

But Mia was insistent and convinced her to give him a chance, and so it began. He picked her up in San Francisco and drove her forty minutes into the suburbs where he rented her a mountain bike and led her along the trails dappled with redwoods, ferns, and California poppies.  When the young woman arrived back at her hotel in San Francisco, she was already planning when she would be back to see the doctor. This was all thanks to her friend Mia. 

Mia in many languages refers to the words mine, beloved, or darling. My name, Mia, represented an ode to the love and connection that my parents first experienced when they crossed paths 30,000 feet above the earth, halfway across the world.