A Minor Identity Problem

My father named me Patricia Elizabeth, Patricia after my mother, Elizabeth after his.

When I came home from Trinity Hospital after a month in an incubator because I was only four pounds (and a month early) at birth and they wouldn’t let babies go home until they weighed five, my Uncle George said I looked like Sydney Greenstreet, a well known and very portly bald actor at the time. Thereafter, my close family called me Sydney.

My great aunts called me Patty Beth.

My teachers called me Patricia when I was young. My kindergarten teacher reprimanded me once because I sometimes accidentally left the second “i” out of my very long and complicated name when signing my papers, so in self-defense sometimes I wrote Pat…though that same teacher then reprimanded me for that.

After awhile, in school, though, I did become Pat, although one of my high school best friends nicknamed me Bean because I was so smart. She still calls me that. I guess she thinks I'm still smart. A couple others, who frequently hung around my home, started using my family nickname Sydney, or just Syd.

My husband has about a million constantly evolving names for me, including Boolean (Search), Moldonius, Cloppenflop, Fascisti, to list just a few. I can remember the first one, but it's a little sexually suggestive, so I won't mention it. However, from all this, I can only conclude I am everything to him. He started calling me Dr. (Kitty, Flop, etc.) the semester I started on my doctoral program, so by the time I actually received my Ph.D., I was already perfectly used to being called "Dr."

My first students, high school students, called me Ms O. My college students inevitably called me Dr. O.

Since I left teaching some of my former students have decided they feel comfortable calling me Pat and a couple, who learned of my family nickname, refer to me as Sydney. However, many of them tell me they can never think of me as anyone other than Dr. O. and are uncomfortable calling me anything else even though I invite them to do so.

I took a group tour to Crete once and ended up “adopting” a daughter, another woman on the trip who felt like she could use an additional mother. She calls me Mom.

In the last few years, through an evolving humorous email correspondence, my younger sisters and brother have begun to call me Sister Big, S.B., for short.

I write a lot of letters and emails. It is difficult, sometimes, to remember who calls me what, so whenever I write I sometimes have to stop to think who I am to that person or those particular people. Sometimes I can’t even sign an email because it would involve too many different names, so I just let the email address, my initials peo, make do.

A former student asked me in an email recently if I WANTED to be Dr. O. I don’t even know how to answer that because I AM Dr. O….but I am also Patricia Elizabeth, Patty Beth, Sydney, Syd, Pat, Sister Big, Bean, Dr. Flop, Dr Kitty, Mom, Fascisti, Muldonius, Boolean Search…...

What's a girl to do!? I'm just glad I never changed my last name. I could get hopelessly confused.