I somehow managed to convince him, at the last minute, to add the name “Bracha.” Her two-year-old brother called her Rikki, and the nickname stuck.

When little Rikki was six weeks old, I e-mailed my parents a picture of her, along with the words, “She’s so different from my other kids. I wonder how she’s going to be when she grows up.”

My other kids had all had dark coloring, like me, but Rikki was fair, like Gedalyah. Bubbe would have been proud of her namesake, I often thought to myself, rolling my eyes inwardly. Bubbe’s preference for fair coloring, I knew, came from her Holocaust background: In Nazi-controlled Europe, children with Aryan features were easier to pass off as gentiles. Even so, I considered it hopelessly superficial to favor a child because he had blond hair and blue eyes.

Rikki’s personality was also very different from those of her older siblings. The others were gentle, sensitive souls, easily hurt and occasionally kvetchy, but there was nothing gentle about Rikki. She didn’t kvetch — she hollered. Even as a baby, she was tough and forceful. Just like Bubbe, I thought. But I never shared that thought with anyone.

Having been through the toddler stage with five other children, I was no stranger to temper tantrums. But Rikki’s tantrums made those of my older children look like, well, child’s play. She was impossibly obstinate, and if she didn’t get what she wanted, she could scream for hours on end.

My other kids had sailed through school; they were all sweet, obliging students, the type that teachers love. Rikki was the type of student that teachers love to hate: challenging, defiant, and stubborn.

It’s because of the name, I kept telling myself.

Until Rikki started school, I never came home from a PTA meeting with anything less than a glowing report. With Rikki, I discovered that PTA meetings are not always about nachas.

In fifth grade, Rikki was suspended from school for blowing up at a teacher. I was heartbroken. Not one of my other kids had ever been suspended. And she was only ten!

That year, she had an old-school teacher who made the girls recite the pesukim of the Chumash over and over again and drilled them endlessly on lists of Hebrew spelling and vocabulary words. This teacher didn’t appreciate being challenged, and she accused Rikki of chutzpah each time she asked a question. Rikki couldn’t stand her teacher, and every morning she made a fuss about not wanting to go to school. I was marrying off my oldest daughter that year, but the task of making a wedding paled in comparison to living with an angry, miserable preadolescent.

“And she’s not even a teenager yet,” Gedalyah remarked wryly.

Without Gedalyah’s knowledge, I made an appointment to speak to our rav, Rabbi Nikolman, and I described Rikki to him. “I think it has to do with the name,” I confided, sharing for the first time my reservations about naming her after Bubbe.

Rabbi Nikolman waved his hand dismissively. “Don’t worry about the name,” he assured me. “Just give your daughter loads and loads of love. But you also have to be firm with her. Strike her with a feather, as they say.”

My niggling concerns about the name were not allayed by this answer, though. I decided to consult a different rav, Rabbi Freiler, after first asking a sh’eilah whether I was allowed to seek guidance from a second rav on an issue I had already asked one rav about.

Unlike Rabbi Nikolman, Rabbi Freiler was not so quick to dismiss my concerns. “It’s very possible that your daughter’s nature has something to do with who she’s named after,” he said. “I have to think about this. Come back in a few days.”

When I came back to him, his advice shocked me. “It might be a good idea to call your daughter by her second name,” he said.

My heart sank. How would I ever explain this to Gedalyah?

Well, I had to give it a try. “Um, Gedalyah, you know, I’ve been worried about Rikki. Maybe if we’d call her by her other name she’d bring us more brachah?”

As I expected, Gedalyah thought I was out of my mind. “You don’t just call a kid a different name if she’s misbehaving!” he exclaimed. “That can be traumatic to a child! Where did you get this idea from?”

“I spoke to Rabbi Freiler,” I said meekly, “and that was his advice.”

Gedalyah went to speak to Rabbi Freiler himself, and he returned home from that discussion with a very different impression. “Rabbi Freiler says we don’t have to call her by her second name,” he informed me with finality.

I realized there was no point in pushing the issue. The name isn’t going away, I told myself sadly. I’m just going to have to make peace with it.

And then I realized something else, something so startlingly simple, I was almost ashamed I hadn’t realized it before. It makes no difference what Rikki’s name is. She’s the child Hashem gave me, and she’s the child I have to love.

Suddenly, I understood what daas Torah had been telling me. Rabbi Freiler had agreed that on a metaphysical level, it was possible that Rikki’s name had something to do with personality, and the difficulties her personality was causing. But Rabbi Nikolman had tried to convey to me that what was going on in the mystical realm was immaterial. What mattered in This World was action — and action meant forgetting the name and dealing with the child.

The child!

I had been so busy drawing parallels to her great-grandmother and contrasting her with her siblings that I had neglected to see this child as a person — a unique neshamah who needed a megadose of motherly love and acceptance, not meta-analysis or doomsday prognostication.

Recalling Rabbi Nikolman’s advice, I resolved to shower Rikki with love, while brandishing the feather of firmness. Firmness, I understood: You set certain limits and enforce them if necessary. But what did it mean to shower a child with love? All normal parents love their children. So what was I supposed to be doing differently with Rikki?

As I pondered this question, I was privy to two incidents that cemented, for me, how not to give love.

One day, while attending a school event, I met a woman who had a daughter in Rikki’s class. “I’m so, so busy these days,” the woman said with a sigh. “But my daughter really needs more attention. So I decided to send her for art lessons on Sunday mornings while I’m out running errands. Would your daughter want to join?”

Your daughter doesn’t need art lessons, my mind screamed. She needs YOU! Stay home with her on Sunday mornings and have fun baking cookies together!

Another day, I was standing in line in a pizza shop and I noticed a mother eating lunch with her son. She was typing something on her phone furiously, while he was licking an ice cream, staring across the room.

You have a neshamah across the table who’s craving your attention! I wanted to shout at her. This is such precious time with your child — use it to connect with him! Don’t ignore him!

It’s always easier to see what other people are doing wrong than to see what you’re doing wrong. But I took these two incidents as lessons to myself as to what love isn’t. Love isn’t art lessons. Love isn’t ice cream. Love isn’t even taking your kid out for lunch.

So what IS love? I asked myself. And I answered: Love is giving yourself.

I started walking Rikki to the bus stop every morning and chatting with her while waiting for her bus — something I hadn’t done since she was in preschool. I started writing her wacky love notes every single day and slipping them into her knapsack. I started playing games with her and telling her jokes every day before bedtime.

I don’t know what’s going to be with this child, I told myself. But whatever happens with her, I want to be able to look back and say I gave her as much love as I could.

I was still a busy mother with a few little ones under Rikki, plus a job to juggle, but I made a point of showing my love to her morning, afternoon, and evening without fail — plus as many times as I could squeeze in in between.

Still, Rikki continued to erupt in anger regularly. Each morning I braced myself for the daily door-slamming and stomping around the house. When she finally boarded her bus, I said Mizmor L’sodah. Each afternoon, I braced myself anew for Rikki’s predicable homecoming explosion.

“Space Shuttle Challenger explodes upon reentry,” was how I described it to Gedalyah.

No matter how tense and frustrated I felt after one of Rikki’s outbursts, I made it my business to calm myself down and continue relating to her with love and warmth. She’s just a child, I’d remind myself. And if I don’t love her as she is, who will?

Certainly not the school. Even after her disastrous fifth-grade year, she continued giving her teachers a run for their money. Each year, for Purim, I would send gifts not only to her teachers, but to the resource room staff as well, since they were the ones who often dealt with Rikki when she was sent out of class — which was often. School, for Rikki, was a battle zone, and I had to combat that by making home a haven for her, even as I tried working with her teachers and not against them.

Thankfully, when Rikki reached bas mitzvah age, her angry eruptions started to taper off. Instead, her powerful personality began to express itself in other ways. Her taste in clothing, for instance, veered sharply to the outrageous. Feather in hand, I took her shopping in sporting goods stores, buying her platform sneakers the color of a raging fire and clothing in every color of the rainbow — with the caveat that she couldn’t wear these clothes outside the house. When she came downstairs the first day of Chanukah vacation dressed in a bright red shirt, yellow skirt, and fiery sneakers, I swallowed a gulp, and instead put on a deep, gruff voice. “Smokey Bear here,” I boomed, “reportin’ a blazin’ fire. Ranger, bring on them marshmallows.”

Rikki howled in laughter. That afternoon, I bought her a package of marshmallows, and we made a little fire with some barbecue coals and roasted marshmallows together.

Rikki loved wild, rocky music, and while Gedalyah and I didn’t quite enjoy the songs she played, or the volume she played them at, we did allow her to play whatever songs she wanted in the house, as long as they were marginally Jewish.

But when she asked if she could attend a sports event, which was against school rules, we said no. “I’d be happy to take you,” Gedalyah told her, “but you’re in a school, and you have to follow the school rules.”

She put up an earsplitting fuss, but we stood firm. To soften the blow, we took out our feather and offered to take her rock climbing instead. She begrudgingly accepted the offer.

Somehow, Rikki managed to graduate elementary school. She had her heart set on attending the high school her older sister had attended, which was where most of her friends were going, but Gedalyah and I felt that it would not be the right place for her. “It’s too academic, too square, too stiff,” was the way Gedalyah summed it up. Not wanting to clip her wings, however, we let her apply.

The administrator of that high school did us a tremendous service by calling to tell us that they couldn’t accept Rikki, rather than send a rejection letter in the mail. We never did tell Rikki that she had been rejected, as that would have been devastating to her. Instead, we were open with her about our concerns that the school wasn’t a match for her.

“It’s really not the place for me,” she admitted. “But I want to be with my friends.”

We floated the idea of her attending a different school, where the environment was more relaxed and the girls had room for individuality. Initially, she was resistant, but when we explained that we were concerned that in the other high school she’d have teachers like her fifth-grade teacher who couldn’t handle being challenged, she agreed to go for an interview in the smaller school. I davened my kishkes out that she should be impressed with the school, and baruch Hashem she was.

Even after Rikki entered high school, I continued to look for ways to show my love to her. By now, she had outgrown our little games and jokes, but I still walked her to the bus each morning and slipped little poems and treats into her backpack on days when she had a big test.

Rikki’s high school career hasn’t been without bumps. She’s had her share of run-ins with teachers, and she keeps the wildest hours, collapsing into bed for a couple of hours as soon as she returns home from school and then studying (read: talking on the phone with her friends) until the wee hours of the morning. Every day brings another gulp-inducing surprise: a newfangled hairdo, a pair of interesting earrings, a homework assignment submitted with quirky cartoons in the margins.

One summer, when she was 15, she came up with the idea of offering house-painting services to the neighbors. Not being so keen on her going into people’s houses alone, I made some discreet inquiries and found a frum woman who specialized in painting wall murals. We paid this woman to “hire” Rikki as her assistant for the summer, and each day, Rikki happily went to work painting alongside her “boss,” unaware that her salary was being paid by us.

“How can you let your daughter paint people’s houses?” one horrified neighbor asked me.

“It’s good for her,” I said, without a trace of embarrassment. “This is a very clean job, trust me.”

But for all Rikki’s shenanigans, her relationship with Gedalyah and me is rock-solid. Today, it’s not only I who writes offbeat love notes to her — she writes plenty of them to me, too.

She’s hardly grown up yet, but the love I invested in her is already coming back to me. One night, she called to ask me what’s for supper. “Nothing special,” I said. “Just some chicken and rice.”

“Everything you make is special, Mommy,” she declared. “It has your love in it.”

For my birthday, she bought me a mushy card that said, “To the mother who is everything to me.” In it, she wrote, “I love you more and more each day.”

Those were the very words I had written and said to her so many times. These expressions of love had wormed their way into the fabric of her psyche, to be mirrored back with all the force and power of her oversized personality.

I don’t know where life is going to take Rikki. A preschool teacher, she’s not going to be. A speech therapist, forget it. More likely an astronaut, or a rocket scientist. But one thing she’ll take with her wherever she goes, and that’s her mother’s love.

Her Bubbe, I’m sure, is proud.

(Originally featured in Mishpacha, Issue 695)