My mother allowed me a half hour of television a day. I was supposed to come home from school, finish my homework, and then have one thirty minute show. Of course this isn’t how it worked.

I came home from school, sat down at the coffee table, pulled out all my homework, turned on the TV and during commercial breaks, if I wasn’t jumping up for a snack, I did my homework. I always made sure to have my homework done before my mom came home, and I always made sure to turn the TV off before she came in the door.

“How was your day?”

“Good.”

“Did you get your homework done?”

“Finishing up now.”

“Did you watch your show yet?”

“Nope. I want to watch it with you.”

For it wasn’t so much that I cared about TV as I wanted to do something with her that was ours.

I can’t remember the lineup anymore, what show on which day, but there were shows we’d watch together: Family Ties, and The Wonder Years. I’m sure there were others, but those were her favorites. She’d let me pick whatever I wanted and watch it with me, but Punky Brewster and Growing Pains weren’t really her thing. I always picked a show she liked if I could help it, my greatest fear being her calling an end to this daily ritual.

As a parent, especially a single parent as she was (a feat I can, thankfully, only imagine), your time is limited but your time is all your child wants. It wouldn’t have mattered if we were laying on the couch with no television, simply being together for thirty minutes. I would have loved that. I’d gladly watch anything she wanted to watch just for the chance to be together for thirty minutes.

I try to remember that with my kiddos now. Every morning when they wake up and come out to the living room and find me typing away, I put the computer on the end table and hold out my arms. They come flooding to the couch, climbing up on either side of me. We readjust my throw blanket across all of us and snuggle up. Sometimes they ask to do a puzzle on my iPad, an app I keep just for them; but usually we just cuddle. It’s better than TV. Cuddle time is my favorite time of day.

“My parents are hippies,” I say. The easiest explanation, and not untrue.

My parents are hippies, or were…I’m not sure how that works when one is dead and the other has mellowed happily into the role of grandmother and matriarch.

The truth is much less interesting, at least to me. Mainly because I have to imagine it, as I was there but not old enough to remember myself, being a baby and all.

My father is an alcoholic, or was before he died of “Alzheimer’s related complications.” A fancy way of saying his body forgot how to function and he drowned in no water whatsoever. Because my father was an alcoholic, I can’t imagine the scene of my birth as being anything other than a moment in which he is drunk and celebrating.

When I was born you still had to name your baby before leaving the hospital, and my mother wanted to go home. She was holding me, I’m told, and my father and his best friend and his best friend’s wife were all in the room congratulating my mother and trying to come up with names for this new baby so everyone could go home and the party could really get started. (I imagine my poor mother, unaware of what she’d married into, but about to learn).

I wasn’t there, so I can’t tell you who said what, but I’ve heard the story enough to know names were being bandied about for a long time. Eventually the time and the alcohol caught up and the names being tossed out were raucous, no longer serious but desperate.

“How about Tuesday? Like Tuesday Weld!”

“Wednesday, from the Addam’s Family!”

“My Girl Friday!”

“Sunday!”

And then I imagine it got a little bit quieter, a truth in the room spoken and ringing clear.

“Sunday is my favorite day.”

“There’s nothing I love more than a Sunday.”

Something barfingly close to that.

And thus, I was named. My parents were able to go home. I’m confident the party continued for one of them anyway.

When I tell people about my hippie parents naming me I shrug it off and laugh, “It could be worse,” I say, “I could be Rainbow Moonbeam!” We all laugh, every time.

Sometimes when you have an odd name, you have an odd story to go with it. And sometimes that odd story would be a bit sad and dark if told in full. Sometimes it’s a bit better to have an easy ruse.

“I love your name!”

“Oh, thank you. My parents are hippies.” Smile. Laugh.