max

After a tough morning of shelling on Captiva Island, Max strikes his best “I’m too sexy for my shirt” pose.

One day when he was five, he came home from school and announced that he no longer wanted to be named Jeffrey (the name we gave him at birth) because the kids in his kindergarten class were calling him “Jeff” and he didn't particularly care for that. He told us he wanted a new name – one that couldn’t be shortened. Abbie retrieved the baby name book we still had on our shelf. Stuck inside it was a list of the other names we'd been considering for him. Max was among them - for Eddie's uncle.

By the next morning, he had indeed become his own Max. He liked it a lot because it couldn’t be truncated, and also there was no way you could make any of the letters backward. Plus, it had a "X" in it, and that was very cool.

We got a few phone calls from irate parents later that week. Frustrated moms and dads would declare, “You can’t just let your kid change his name. Now our daughter thinks she can do the same thing, and we don’t really support that kind of thing… blah, blah, blah.”

I quietly cheered him on, “You go, little one. Be your own person.”