Five

Has always been my favorite number.
Born in the fifth month, five people in my family and one of five "Sarah's" in my Kindergarten class.
In 1980, the number five most popular name(there's my number again) 272,522 Sarah's (also 104,634 Sara's) born in the USA.  And in my class of thirteen girls, there were FIVE...all with the H.

We had to utilize other forms of our names to tell us apart.
There was: Sarahbeth, Sarah Marie, Sarah(yeah I wasn't too happy that she got the real deal) Sarah B(I think that was her) and me.  I got to be called..Sari.  Sare-eee. 

There are only two living people in the entire world that can call me Sari and I won't kill them. The third person is dead.

Almost every class/school there have been other Sarah's in my vicinity.  Seems it was one of those names.  You know the ones...we will be our children's Aunt Florence, Grandma Milly, or my fave--Edna.  But our kids will have Great-Aunt Jessica, Grandma Michele,  Great-Grandma Jen....it's funny really.

Names are such an extension of ourselves, I've always found it really strange that so many other people have my name.  There is even two others with my last name.  Thanks Google.  I used to fantasize that my name was something like:

Lillian
Eleanor
Victoria

Last year my niece Beatrix popped into the world.  She is the only Beatrix I have ever met.  I hope that she will not have my same crazy Kindergarten nickname experience, although she's already called Beep Boop and Bebe by me.

After my Kindergarten inundation of Sarah's, I began to hate my name.  It felt used, unoriginal I could walk in a room anywhere and someone could say it and three girls would look.  OKay, so it's not as bad as all those many Jennifers (girls at least you have a few cute nickname variations!), but as the years have progressed my name has started to grow on me a bit.
The thing is Sarah has been in the top twenty names for close to one hundred years.  Proudly, I have two ancestors who share my name--one born in the late 1700's the other in the 1800's.  But hey, I guess that for a few hundred years most people were named either John or Mary or James or Elizabeth so maybe I shouldn't complain so much.And I've come to like my name.

 In the grocery store today,  I heard,

"Sarah! Come here."

I turned around to see a young girl of about four running away in the produce section.  So the name continues on to other generations.


Identity is a fascinating subject.  Names denote so much about a person.  Socioeconomic status, race, age, gender etc.

Here is something Freakonomics wrote about names.  Well just listen to it...I find stuff like this fascinating.

And to all my fellow SARAH's out there live the meaning of our name, Princess.