Covered Bridges and The Woman Who Lost Her Names

While reading the two short stories Covered Bridges by Barbara Kingsolver and The Woman Who Lost Her Name by Nessa Rapoport I discovered that both girls in the story had trouble with aspects of themselves.

Covered Bridges is about a husband and wife who contemplate if they should have a baby or not. Lena works for a poison hotline and specializes in toxicology. She has had many health problems associated with her family but she wants to conceive despite this fact. Her sister had died from being stung by a bee and she holds the same allergy to bees. The husband is a professor of botany and at first is apprehensive about the idea of having a child. So the couple decides to do a "test run" and watch the MacElroy's baby for the weekend. At first they get used to it and enjoy it but the second day it gets a little more difficult than anticipated. To calm down the crying baby, the couple decides to take it outside to the park. The twist comes in the story when Lena gets stung by a hornet and comes close to dying before her husband saves her life with an EpiPen. Dramatic events in life can alter the way someone thinks and views a situation. The fact that Lena almost lost her life due to a hornet sting made her realize she didn’t want to bring a baby into the world and risk losing it. Although, I think this is the wrong way to look at it. By bringing a person into the world, you’re giving them the opportunity to discover and experience things they would have never experienced. Also, you as a person can be impacted by their presence in your life. If you live life worrying about what could happen to you, you lose out on potential memories and experiences that could be unforgettable. I thought the husband in the end was going to turn around and want the baby after all, but to my surprise they settled on just having each other. Lena had a problem with the fact that her genetics and history could cause harm and possible death to her baby, so she eliminated that risk all together by deciding to be content where she was.

In the short story The Woman Who Lost Her Names, a name means a lot to the main character. When she was first born, she was named Sarah which was rare at that time and was after her grandmother. Josephine was then added to her name after her brother Yosef had died and then it was once again changed when she entered school. The teacher found it better to call her Sally and thought it would make her more integrated into the school. At a young age, her name was changed quite a few times. This caused her to have trouble with her identity until she met a boy named Eretz Yisrael who she would soon marry. He convinced her that it was "Just a name" and "the soul underneath it is the same". He then asked her to change her name to Yosefah because he could not marry someone with his mother’s name. They got married and lived in New York City until he achieved his doctorate and then they moved away to Israel. While in Israel, tragedy arose with her family. Her mother had grown sick and died and she became pregnant. When discussing the name for their baby girl, they couldn’t agree and in the end she sits in the crowd waiting to hear her daughter’s name. I think the end was disappointing because I wanted to know the baby’s name both for me and for Yosefah. I think it was important that she had control over someone’s name for once since she had no control over hers in all those years. The problem with changing names is she thought she was changing herself by doing that when she came to realize that that was not true. Many think it is their name that defines who they are but in fact it is actually the person they are in the end. The name is nothing but a title to call yourself and doesn’t show your true being which is what Yosefah struggled with.