Thank God my dad won the “name the baby” battle. My mom, a Georgia/Tennessee, native, begged him to agree to name me Georgia. He refused.

Even though I’m grateful for narrowly escaping being dubbed as a child of the South for the rest of my life, I feel sorry for my mom every time I think about her wanting to include her Southern heritage into my name, and into so many other aspects of our lives, wistfully longing for her own childhood home while stuck in the dry, flat city of Wichita, Kansas. My dad, a Delaware native and son of Polish immigrants, had no connection to or reverence for the South. And although my stepdad tried his best to fit in when we moved to Arkansas, learning to speak with a Southern accent, adopting turkey hunting as a hobby, and even trading “you guys” for “y’all,” he probably never…