[Or why I am named Kyle]
A lot of people ask me about why I am named Kyle, and my initial instinct is to say that my name is Kyle because my parents named me that. Then I usually turn the question back around on them so they know just how hard of a question it is to answer.
Of course, I do end up telling them why my parents decided to name their baby girl “Kyle,” although I don’t think it’s the exciting tale they were hoping for.
Most people guess that my name is Kyle because my parents thought they were having a boy and then just decided to go ahead with the name even though I was a girl. That is not the case. If I had been a boy, I actually would have been named Adam.
The real story is that my parents decided to name me Kyle because they heard about a woman named Kyle who loved her name. My parents thought it about it for a while, talked to some friends and coworkers, and found more and more females with the name Kyle who also loved their name. As a result, I was named Kyle.
Like I said, not so exciting.
To this day, I have only met two other females by that name so I do not put a whole lot of faith into this story that my parents told me, but when I looked up the meaning of my name online I did discover that there were a lot of baby girls named Kyle from 1978 to 1990.
However, there was no record as to when all these women went into hiding.
Of course, being a female named Kyle has led to a lot of confusion over the years. I have had people call me Kylie, Kyla, Keile, and various other names that they thought were more suitable for a girl than Kyle. Then there are the people who just pair my first and middle name together as if my first name was Kyle-Marie, or, on a more drastic note, people who just start calling me Marie and expect me to answer.
That does not work, by the way.
I get a lot of mail addressed to a “Mr. Kyle Freelander” and official phone calls asking to speak to the same non-existent man. Then there are the people who see my name on paper and expect a male in person, so I get a lot of comments on that as well.
Most of the time I find the errors people make when it comes to my name to be amusing but other times I wish people would stop acting like it was the end of the world for a girl to have what is typically considered to be a “boy name” (although I do not refer to it as such, for obvious reasons).
As far as meaning to my name, online sources tell me that Kyle is a Scottish name that means a strait of water, that Marie means bitter, and that my last name is evidently so uncommon that I cannot find any source that wanted to even touch on meaning for me. So, as far as Freelander goes, it likely has something to do with free land.
Yes, I am bitter strait of water that flows across free land.
Well, maybe.
The actual “meaning” to my name has never meant a whole lot to me because my parents didn’t look into meaning when they picked my name. They just thought Kyle would be a strong, unique name for a girl, and I agree.
When pronounced correctly, I love my name. When people mess it up or try to change it, I inadvertently cringe, correct them, and then I am usually required to go into some lengthy tale about how I got that name.
One of these days, I am just going to start making up crazy stories as to why my name is Kyle but for now people will have to be satisfied with the truth.
I am a female named Kyle.
Get over it.
