A rose by any other name.

My maiden name is Stephanie Jean Sweeney.  When I got married, I dropped the Jean and made Sweeney my middle name, making my legal name Stephanie Sweeney Berry.  I was more attached to Sweeney than I was to Jean and did not want to be bothered by the whole hyphenation thing.

These have not been my only names, however.  Besides the obvious shortening of Stephanie to Stephie and Steph, at a very young age, I gained the following nicknames:  Birdie/Birdie Bert and Gert/Gert Hopper. 

My mother coined Birdie when I was two or three years old.  As the story goes, I would not eat food off of my own plate, preferring instead to sit on the edge of my Mom’s chair and eat the food from her plate, the way a baby bird eats worms from its mother’s beak I guess.  Birdie Bert was just an extension of that.

Around the same time, I got the nickname Gert Hopper, which I just recently learned was coined by my Uncle Dave Hasenstein. For 30+ years I was under the mistaken impression that the nickname came after meeting a friend of my parents named Gert, which I apparently found hilarious and kept repeating. (I imagined it being similar to Will Ferrell’s character “Buddy” in the movie Elf when he repeats the name “Francisco”).  I then thought Gert morphed into Gert Hopper because I used to jump back and forth from the sofa to the coffee table, which made my mother such a nervous wreck that she would flip the coffee table on its top to prevent me from “hopping” onto the couch from it.

Gert Hopper!

 

Later in childhood and into high school I was called simply by my last name of Sweeney, as well as other combinations like Sweeney-Jean and Stephie-Jean.  Freshman year in high school a boy in my English class started calling me Smiley since I smiled so much.  In college, my roommate Becky started referring to me as Sweeney-Butt. I’m not quite sure why.  I should really ask her about that one of these days.