I’m in the first grade and we have a substitute teacher for the first time. As she’s reading off the attendance sheet, her face scrunches up and looks around, “I’m not even going to try and say that,” she says laughing.
Most of my classmates turn to stare at me. Whether it was a substitute teacher, the first day of classes, meeting new people or starting a new job, this is a big part of my life.
I’m named after my paternal grandmother, like most Greek-American kids are. My brother is named after my paternal grandfather, my mother after her paternal grandmother and my father after his paternal grandfather. It’s a tradition that most Greeks like to follow.
This proved to not be a problem for most of the Greek kids I grew up around. All the “Marias,” “Nicks” and “Guses” I knew never had this problem, but I got the difficult name. To make matters worse, my brother was named “Chris,” well, not really.
My family refers to my brother by his baptismal name “Christo,” but on his birth certificate, he is “Chris,” so my brother never had attendance anxiety as I did.
When meeting people with my mother she loves to tell the story, “Well we knew her name was going to be Evgenia of course,” then she would pause and take a breath, “but when we were filling out her birth certificate we couldn’t agree on a nickname to put on her birth certificate, so we just put Evgenia!”
The idea that my parents gave me a name no one could pronounce killed me. To me, it felt like they were setting me up for embarrassment. I envied the girls with short names, names that everyone knew how to say, those who had the same name and those who had the initial of their last names said after so people could decipher who they were speaking to.
In the sixth grade, in my first-period class, my teacher gave me the nickname “Eve,” and I immediately hated it. Even worse, it stuck for all three years of my middle school experience — I was “Eve.”
I would complain to my mom after school, “What would you like people to call you then, you don’t like Eve, you don’t like Evgenia. What is it going to be then?”
I think it took hating Eve to love Evgenia. To love “EV-YE-NIA” to make a big deal out of people learning how to say it, to know that it didn’t take much to learn how to say it and to realize that everyone who loved me, made a big deal of everyone saying it correctly.
Evgenia is not only me, but she is the woman who started working in a small village at age 12, she is the woman who came to America with two young children and while not speaking a word of English and she is the woman who raised all four of her grandchildren.
My grandmother, the first Evgenia Kopanos died this past February. She was the strongest woman I know, and she set this life up for me.
She taught me how to stand up for myself, she kept me in check and she made sure I was aware of the privilege I had. The privilege that she gave me by coming to America.
How could I not love Evgenia? Evgenia gave me everything I needed. Evgenia is everything I love.
My name is Evgenia, pronounced “EV-YE-NIA” not “Ev-JE-NIA,” not “EV-GINA” and definitely not “EV-JENIA.”