another sandra.

I don't even know the girl, but I hate her all the same.

No, no, I don't hate her. Hate is really a strong word, Daddy told me not to use it unless I meant it. He told me that back when I said I hated things like rain and tests and Melinda Sanders who took the last cupcake and didn't even finish it all. And I rolled my eyes or maybe sighed quietly in a subtle defiance that couldn't be seen or heard and therefore couldn't be punished. But now, here I am, a grown woman, at least the state of North Carolina says so, and I still wait for my dad to scold me if I misuse the word "hate". I suppose that was his aim.

But anyway, I don't hate her. I don't hate her because I don't know her and even I am not that shallow.

I resent her. Yes, that's the word. I resent her, and I envy her, and I fear her, and I am intimidated by her very existence. She holds this immense sway over me, and she doesn't know that I exist. I only know that she exists by chance. The chance that a friend of mine said he knew a girl named Sandra that wasn't me, a very small chance indeed when you think about it, and that was all it took. Even if he happened to tell her that he knew a girl named Sandra that wasn't her, because it's me, I don't think she would even care.

The news that she was out there, living in this very same country as I do with the very same name that I have, was enough for me to fall apart. I begged him not to tell me that she was attractive or intelligent, which he did not.

He told me she was gorgeous and brilliant.

Did I say I wanted honesty? I didn't mean it.

See, it's different for me. I'm not like a Jennifer or an Ashley or a Jessica. Those girls grow up having five or six others sharing their names around them. They grow up as a first name and a last initial, so we could distinguish them from the Jennifer W.'s and the Ashley B's. Me, I never had that problem. No one names their kids Sandra anymore, that was a generation ago. That's why all the Jennifers and the Ashleys and the Jessicas have mothers named Sandra. And they didn't matter, because they're not in my league. They all have to compete against each other, in the Mothers Named Sandra category, but I've always been the only one in my age group, the only runner in my heat.

But now there's this other one, this Sandra who dares to be my age, gorgeous and brilliant. And I am, I am threatened, yes, that's it, threatened by the fact that not only is she Sandra, she is probably much better at being Sandra than I am. She has taken being Sandra to new levels, she is now the model that all future Sandras will have to live up to while I fall by the wayside as just another Sandra that lived in the time of The Great Sandra but wasn't as good. No one would even bother to remember my name if not for the cruel fact that it is the same as hers.

I might as well have been a Jennifer.