Changing Destiny
From Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Empowered Woman
By April Knight

From our ancestors come our names, but from our virtues our honors.
~Proverb

When I was born, my mother named me Linda Pearl Davison. My mother was feuding with her sister-in-law, and she named me “Linda” to spite her sister-in-law, who had planned to name her baby Linda. I was born first (by a week), but my mother’s sister-in-law refused to be cheated out of the name she’d chosen and also named her baby Linda. Now there were two “Linda Davisons” in our small town. My mother and her sister-in-law never spoke to each other again, and I never met the cousin who shared my name.

The name “Pearl” was given to me because my mother owed several months’ back rent to a woman named Pearl. She hoped if she named her baby after her landlady, she wouldn’t evict her. It didn’t work. I especially hated the name Pearl when I discovered it was a growth inside a mollusk. I never pictured a pearl as a precious jewel. To me, it was a tumor in the slimy stomach of a shellfish. (Keep reading)