I am nobody special, but I say that lovingly. I played in mud even after being scolded indefinitely, I devoured books like my life was just as in danger as the protagonist’s, and I sunk into my mother’s arms after I tripped on the sidewalk for the twentieth time every day. She cooed my name for the twentieth time, holding my fragile body like I was a porcelain doll, dressed in only the finest (from the thrift store) and fed like royalty (that budgeted government assistance). I was like any other snotnosed kid with heedful eyes and a brain that absorbed everything those eyes latched onto.

My mother would not say the same. It makes sense to hyperfocus on the someone you created from nothing. When two other girls in my elementary school shared my full name, she lamented she would have chosen differently if she knew, because of course mi princesa deserves the best. How different was I really from those two girls?

The name is where the deviation started.

“I would really prefer Julian. Please.” My sophomore year of high school was kicked off by my decision to debut as somebody worth paying attention to, but despite my insistence I wasn’t. My academics might have shown a star, but I was petrified of what name might be inscribed on a plaque and who could read it. Under no circumstances could I stand out: no trouble, no calls home, no parent-teacher functions without scripting beforehand. I strained under the weight of secrecy, but my name was my privilege. I treasured it like an old pair of jeans. 

Months later, walking home from school and preparing to make my bodily switch, I got a call from my mom. 

“Why are people calling you Julian?”

That day, my name became an insult. She had looked through my journal entries, which were hoping and wishing for a different, shinier life. And, consistent with the fantasy, I had signed them: Julian Valentín Hernandez.

Hearing her say it was like water stuck in my ears, pounding at my brain. There was no warmth in the way she said it. Indifference would have been preferred, the neutral confusion of a name without prejudgement, but each vowel was spit with ire and animosity.

Through the course of the next four years, I grew and matured and I understood myself more fully, but I lived under an unrelenting rule: 

“Do not call me Julian at home.”

“Oh, sorry, does your mom not know yet?” People always asked, eager for any way to support. I appreciated it, but it was family business.

“No, she does. But it’s… It’s a whole thing. It’s fine.” It had to be. It would have been easier to bare my teeth and walk out the door the day I turned 18, maybe, but I’d been raised to love my family through the worst. 

Loving my family is less painful now across the country, in college. When I call home, we can laugh and gossip like always, and my mother  will console me when I moan about the cold, just like when I’d fall on the sidewalk so long ago. But when the calls end, and I live my name, she is not there to hear it.

When I was christened, did she fantasize about hearing it echo against church pews? Did she murmur it over my cradle as I gripped her finger, wondering if I would grip a pen or a paintbrush next? All the things that identified me were now filed under “Julian.”  Everything but her.