What Name?

It’s been a bit “N”utty around here lately. I’m meeting myself coming and going. So I come to you with a quick and easy topic this week……ME! Nadeen. Which can be confusing sometimes. Why?


I’m also known as:

dEE
Deenie (dEEniE)
Gwamma Montana

When I was born a hundred years ago, by his own admission, my dad couldn’t spell. So when this little girl came out of the deep dark recesses of my mother’s womb, my mom had her reasons for naming me what she did. My dad asked, “Do you spell that Nadeen?” Which most people don’t. But my mom said, “That sounds fine.” Thus I’ve had to spell my first name AND my last name all my life because everyone wants to spell both of them according to norm, which they aren’t.

She wanted to name me Nadeen so my nickname could be Deenie. So it was until I got into first grade and decided that I was too old to be called a childish name like Deenie and I announced to everyone that I was now Nadeen. So it was for 24 years.

Along came a nephew and he couldn’t say Nadeen. Without prior knowledge of my past (sheez, he was only a year old), he started calling me Deenie. By then I was fine with the Deenie label because I wanted to be that young little girl again. And so I went by 2 names. One everyone else used and one that family (and my parent’s friends who I grew up around) used.

Fast forward 18 years. I taught a Bible study to my niece and classmates of my son. Of course, the niece always called me Dennie and the others picked up on it, but I wanted it now to be unique, so I capitalized the EEEEEEEE’s! Sort of 3 names now.

About that time, I hooked up with some gals via the internet but I was well aware of those nuts lurking out there that might want to steal my birthday or something, so when I hooked up with these gals who possibly could be escaped convicts, I didn’t totally tell the truth when I signed up with them as dEE (short for dEEniE, short for Deenie, short for Nadeen)  Well, that’s the only name by which they know me. When I met up with a bunch of them for the first time last month, it was only natural that I be ‘dEE’ to them. They don’t know Nadeen. Now….4 names.

Of course, both Gwammas to my grandgirls had to have last names with the same starting letter. Can’t use that. And since their Mama always said, “Gwamma in Montana”, it got shortened to “Gwamma Montana”. Probably my favorite title of all! Are you counting? 5 names.

Now enters the confusion: who am I? I have to actually stop and think what environment I am in before I introduce myself to someone. Life is so confusing, isn’t it?

So now you know.

And Happy Thursday to you!
Nadeen

Or is it dEEniE?

Or dEE?

Nah. Just call me a Biker Princess.

Don't forget to check out the other great Alphabetizers at

Lydia O.

She would sit in her chair devouring yet another book when suddenly the back screen door would bang shut. She slams her book closed and jumps up from the chair and hurries to the kitchen to cook, once again trying not to reveal to her husband the ‘idle’ time she has just spent reading . . . again.


Lydia loved to read. As a little girl, she would walk the many blocks of Great Falls to the library getting book after book to read. When she married a man, also of German heritage, she moved over 200 miles away from her city life to a farm in rural Montana. A farm that eventually turned into a 30,000 head chickenfarm. A farm that consumed their days.

And yet her reading, and eventually her writing, remained her personal love.

She took those colorful words that she absorbed and jotted versions of them on pieces of scratch paper as snippets or even full paragraphs to use for a later writing. She attended writing classes. She wrote more.

And then one time she submitted a piece to a publication, hoping to possibly get published and acknowledged. Like so many writers, it was declined. And sadly, that was the end of that. She no longer would submit her work and allow getting rejected ever again.

And yet the scratch paper ideas mounted up, getting filed by topic or…just getting filed but never thrown away. As first and second generation Germans, she wrote about both hers and her husband, Pepper’s, ancestry and migration to the ‘new world’.

She eventually became the unofficial Stillwater County historian, interviewing and writing about communities and people and even acting as director of the budding county museum. If she got paid, it was only a token.

Lydia O. is the pen name she chose. Olga was her German middle name – she hated it - but found it unique enough to tag it onto her name for her pen name.

She now sits in a nursing home consumed by that ugly disease called Alzheimer’s and can’t remember a drop of what she so ravenously wrote about. She can’t even remember she was a writer.

THE POINT OF THE POST IS:  As I become more and more exposed to many blogs, different interests and styles of writing via the internet, I think about how my mother would have embraced a blog site of her own to release those thoughts and ideas that continually bounced around in her head.   Methinks she was born abour 30 years too early.   And what a gift it would have been to my silblings and children and grandchildren to have.

So, I dedicate my Alphabe-Thursday submission to my mother, Lydia O., the writer in my family.

(P.S. I have the bittersweet task of going through the massive house she lived in for 60 years and deciding what to do with not only the antiques (collected before antiques were fashionable) and family heirlooms brought from the ‘old country’ but also all those snippets.) 

Do check in at Jenny's blog and find tons of other fascinating "L" post for Alphabe-Thursday.  It gets better and better with each week!  It is a world-wide depiction of how diverse not only the internet is but also how diverse God's precious people are!

Enjoy!  (thus ends the advertisement for this week!)  :)