You're welcome ladies, men who are into men, and men who are into women but can appreciate the jawline of goddamn Captain America.
Anyway, in opposition to my father's claim of "famous baseball player" as the source of my name, my mother's version has always been that she came up with the name and picked it because it meant "Gift from God". For the entirety of my life, that has been the only version of that story ever given during the countless debates between my parents over who picked out the names of their two children. No more or less elaboration than that. Just, "I picked it because it meant gift from God". Sort of boring, but fine.
That is until this past weekend when, during a family cookout the debate came up again and my mother dropped this little gem that she has somehow never thought to mention before:
Apparently the full story of where she came up with the name Matthew is that she read an article in People Magazine about some town that came across the dead, frozen body of an unknown baby, collectively took him in as one of their own, buried him, and named him Matthew because it meant "gift from God."
My mother picked my name after reading a story about some people that found a dead baby in the woods.
Skipping over the fact that this town apparently thought "gift from God" was the appropriate way to feel about about a frozen woods-baby, apparently my Mother read this article and the takeaway was "Hmm, the name they picked out for that tiny frost-hardened corpse has a nice ring to it."
Here's the real kicker. Thanks to modern technology and my expert ability to google "People Magazine, town names dead baby Matthew" I actually found the freaking article. My mother has searchable, verifiable evidence of her insane "picked out your name from People Magazine's story about a dead baby" being true. If you want to read something morbid feel free to click here to see it.
The thing is, the point of the article isn't even a tragic yet heartwarming tale of a community coming together to lay a poor lost child to rest. That part is like, a one paragraph intro at the beginning followed by a lengthy and legitimately upsetting article about how they identified the child two years after the fact and think he was killed by his father who somehow keeps having people close to him die suspiciously but has never been convicted of murder.
How a woman can go nearly three decades and not once during countless rehashings of the same argument think to include the detail that the source of her first born child's name was an article about the murder of a child is an enigma that I, or modern science may never fully unravel.
At the very least, we've got some new details to argue over whenever the discussion of who picked out the kid's names comes up.
If you need me I'll be in Therapy.
