My name is one of my absolute favorite parts about what makes me, me. When my parents decided to have children, they agreed that my mom would pick out the first names and my dad would pick out the middle names. Mom decided to create a pattern with her children’s names. They all will start with the letter “j” and will descend in number of letters. She began with Joshua, a “j” and six letters. Five years later, Jason came with a “j” and five letters. Then came me. A girl’s name with four letters?? What could it be? Jane? No…that wouldn’t work. But Mom had some help. While she was pregnant with me, she was reading a contemporary romance novel. The heroine of the story was married to a man named Jared but he died while she was pregnant. She went into labor in a taxi and the cabbie helped get her to the hospital and stayed with her while she gave birth to a little girl. The cabbie’s name was Steven. In order to honor both men, the heroine named her baby girl Jara Stephanie. Mom immediately fell in love with the name therefore some odd months later, when she gave birth to her youngest child and only girl, she declared the girl’s name to be Jara. It is not a common name, people pronounce it incorrectly all the time, but I think Mom did a stupendous job picking out my name because its uniqueness embodies who I am.
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