What’s in my name?

My name is Dureza Antoinette. It is pronounced as “Doo-re-za An-twa-ney”. The name Dureza was my father’s weird choice while the name Antoinette was my mother’s choice. Back in my elementary and high school days, I used to have had aversions over my parents for their bad taste in choosing a name for me. I basically never liked my given name and I had thousands of reasons never to like it at all. My name, Dureza, which has an “A” at the end, has a quality of being inelegantly archaic. The Antoinette, though, is somehow more sophisticated which in one way or another modernized the antiquity of my other name. It is ironical why I hated classic names when to most people it is the best sounding names. My name was in itself a victim of countless disastrous mispronunciations and several murderous misspellings when I was in my elementary grades and high school years. Some of my teachers incorrectly pronounced my name as “Due-re-sa”, “Do-ri-sa”, “Dow-rey-sa” or “Due-rey-za”. I just don’t remember if they bothered to ask me how to pronounce it correctly. Nevertheless, I was at fault for having tolerated them to call me as such. I never corrected the mispronunciation of my name for I was then very timid to open my mouth to tell them that was not how my name should be pronounced. I tolerated them to call me “Due-re-sa” or “Do-ri-sa” even if such sounded like bass drum drummed annoyingly and closely to the entrance of my would-be deaf ears. My classmates murdered the spelling of my name as “Dorisa”, “Duriza” “Duressa” and other odd spellings which sounded like Dureza. My name had its share of ridicule from my classmates as it was associated with the name “Doray” which was the name of a very old woman in our Filipino character book whose partner was “Lolo Ingo”. “Doray” eventually became my petname that it made me furious to whoever called me by such name. To whoever called me “Doray” got my raised eyebrow with abhorrence deep in my heart. I find the history of my Dureza name very despicable as the name Dureza was copied from a classic English comic book. When people started asking where my name came from, I was reluctant to tell the truth. I was ashamed to tell them that my father came across that name from a comic book he was reading when my mother was still pregnant with me. Of course, I never told anyone about it in order to save from shame my father who is known to be a bookworm who consumes a day reading thick novels written by brilliant authors. Little do people know that he also reads comic books. When I browsed through the internet, I found out that Dureza is Portuguese term which means hardness, as in hardness of a rock and other solid state. When I went to study college in a leading university, it was then that I learned to appreciate my name. My teachers and classmates praised my name for being unique to them. The pet name “Doray” was changed to “Doris” and the “Dorisa” was pronounced and spelled as “Dureza”. I should have been thankful to them for not being christened as “Candelaria” or “Guada” for being born on the Feast of the Candles (February 2) but my innocence and peer-pressure got more weight to take me to abhor my name.