How I Got My Name - Jennings Paige

My mom’s love story was messy, dramatic, and probably the reason I grew up seeing the world as one long soap opera with better lighting.

My mom, Stephanie, was once upon a time an innocent preacher’s daughter, young and married to her first husband — who gave her my two older brothers. She wanted those little boys more than anything. She fought infertility, probably endometriosis, probably the same thing I inherited. She finally had Christian, then Chase, but the marriage was a disaster. He was a creeper and a cheater, and she miserable.

Enter Bob.

Bob was a TWA pilot furloughed in the ‘70s, taking odd handyman jobs around Manhattan Beach. He came over to fix something at the house, met my mom, and instantly fell in love. My brothers’ dad was being awful, Bob was charming, and before long, they were in too deep. He became the love of her life.

But it was chaos. My mom was still married to my brothers’ dad at first, and Bob was still married to a drunk, and there were stepkids all over the place. Eventually, they both divorced and got married. It was good for awhile, but then Bob cheated, my mom got pregnant, and she miscarried in her second trimester. That baby’s due date was the same as mine later on. My mom always said I was that same baby, just coming back at a different time. I believe her.

After the miscarriage, Bob bailed. Within two months, he married someone else in Texas and got her pregnant right away. My mom was devastated.

Then fate rerouted her. She went to visit my Aunt Squiggs in Houston, and that’s where she met my dad, Dick.

He wooed her relentlessly. My mom told this story of how he once asked if she wanted a chocolate bar the first time she spent the night with him. When she said yes, he came back with fifty different kinds of candy bars cradled in his shirt and dumped them all over the bed. “I didn’t know which kind you wanted,” he told her. She thought it was delightful. He courted her with dinners, jewelry, and attention, and before long, she moved to Texas and married him.

But my mom didn’t want to have more kids, like my dad did. She already had her boys. They were seven and ten years old already, and she felt done. So she hatched a secret plan: drive her convertible Volkswagen Beetle, Albert, back to California, get an IUD, and never tell Dick. She hated living in Houston anyway. She wasn’t in love with him and my brothers missed California as much as my mom did.

She scheduled a doctors appointment and drove all the way home to Manhattan Beach. That was when, just as Bob also happened to be in town visiting his kids, spotted her car, stopped, and confessed he still loved her. Instead of keeping her appointment at the doctor, she went to a hotel with him. And that changed everything.

She went back to Texas, having never gotten the IUD and suspecting she might be pregnant already. That same weekend, Dick took her on a trip to Jennings, Louisiana, to visit his mother, where they slept together too. A month later she was indeed pregnant with me, unsure if I was Bob’s or Dick’s baby.

Here’s where my name comes in. To cover her tracks, my mom told Dick, “Why don’t we name the baby Jennings—after where we conceived, in Jennings, Louisiana?” He loved the idea.

It turned out I am actually Dick’s child—we confirmed it later by blood type when I was sixteen. But my mom loved the magic of it. For her, I was both cosmic prank and cosmic gift.

When I was five months old, she left Texas, moved back to California, and raised me with my brothers by the ocean. We didn’t have much money, but we had joy and love, everything we ever needed. We had each other.

She used to tell me I was her “cosmic lollipop”—the universe’s reward for being brave enough to go through all of what she had to get me. I was born at home in Houston. My Aunt Squiggs took the first photo of me right after I was born and worried all night she’d blinded me with the flash. She hadn’t. I grew up to be a photographer, seeing far beyond what’s in front of me—especially since starting Lotus Moon.

Bob never fully disappeared. Every so often, he circled back into my mom’s life. The pattern was always there, like a tide rolling in and out. They almost remarried when I was ten, but luckily broke up before I got dragged out of California again.

And that’s the story of how I got my name. Out of all that chaos—affairs, heartbreak, chocolate bars, cosmic timing—I arrived. My mom always said I was her best gift, her miracle. And looking back now, I can see the wild weaving of fate in it all. My very name carries both the mess and the magic. The drama of men, the devotion of my mom, and the reminder that the universe doesn’t deal in straight lines. It deals in spirals, returns, and timing. Just like the sound of a bowl, ringing out, circling back, carrying the note of who you were always meant to be.