Elgan has asked another interesting series of questions revolving around the decision, upon marriage, of whether or not to change one�s name.

I did change my name, and I must confess that the primary reason was largely aesthetic. My married name sounds more euphonious with my first name than did my maiden name.

That said, I also felt it was important to have one family name. Had I not intended to have children, I probably would not have done it. However, I wanted all of us to have the same name. I really like the idea of hyphenation in principal, if my husband would have agreed to hyphenating too. But in practice, it was not practical. I already have a hyphenated first name. A double hyphen would have been ridiculous (Imagine, if you will, �Harriet-The-Spy Smith-Jones.� I could be a one-woman law firm. Or wait, I could be an accounting/consulting firm and drop the hyphens altogether: HarrietTheSpy SmithJones. Does the trend towards internal capitals make anyone else as crazy as it makes me?).

I got used to the name change a little more easily than expected, perhaps because my first name is unusual enough that a last name is rarely necessary to identify me. I used to joke about dropping the last name altogether (Cher. Madonna. Harriet.) However, that seemed to demand a little more of a diva nature than I like to muster on a regular basis, so I gave in to the old fashioned way of doing things. After all, I had nothing to do with any of my names. I have merely grown into them. If adopting my husband�s first name defines me as chattel, than what of my father�s surname? How is that really any different?

This is not to say that I think this decision is right for everyone. Quite the contrary. IN my case, I have little discomfort with the idea of name-changing because I have had little in my life to cause me to question my identity or my relationships. I was raised to think of marriage as an equal partnership. The name as a symbol means nothing other than that to me. I come from a long line of independent-minded, self-supporting women who managed to work marriage into their lives in one way or another (and all took their husband�s names). My great grandmother (my mother�s grandmother), born shortly before the great San Francisco earthquake of 1906, divorced her first husband (she had three, adopting the name of each new husband) and supported herself and her children by opening up a dry cleaning/tailor shop on Castro Street. Her daughter, my grandmother, was a war bride. A year or so later when the war ended, she had a baby daughter and her husband took off. She got a college degree and had several careers, including accountant and elementary school teacher, while living in an apartment behind my great-grandmother�s store. She remarried the man I knew as my grandfather when my mother was in preschool and eventually, after his career was on its way, became a more traditional (for the era, anyway) wife and mother.

My mother bucked the trend by being a stay-at-home mom, although she fought it for a long time. She kept trying to do something else � Ph.D., law school, real estate. But my father�s job had us moving every couple of years. In such a situation it is almost impossible to keep both a marriage and two careers alive, so my mom did not get her chance until we were out of the house, when she started spending her summers teaching backpacking to women. By that point she�d come to appreciate the time for independent study, and value it over the enforced participation in an institutional ideal (my mother has a healthy appreciation for a little anarchy). She�s an intellectual without the academy. While she looked from the outside like the perfect cookie-baking PTA mom, she was (and is), in fact, something quite different, for which I am extremely grateful. Perhaps the best way to explain this is by example. A number of years ago, I brought my boyfriend (now husband) home for the weekend. Although the boyfriend had met the parents previously, it was at a graduation ceremony, so there was not much time for real conversation. Shortly after we arrived, we all had congregated in the kitchen where we were assisting with meal preparations. My mom asks, to everyone and noone in particular, �Do you know anyone who is really wise? What do you think makes a person truly wise?� I jump in with an answer. Questions like this are par for the course in my house. My boyfriend, however, looked a little shell-shocked, worried, I think, that it was some kind of test. Questions like this never come up in his family�s kitchen. He jumped into the fray and a lively discussion was had by all.

All this is to say that although the name-change traditions may have checkered pasts, that does not mean you are required to accept past transgressions as part of your own future. Do what you want. Do what works for you. I know people who have changed their names and those who haven�t. I know those where both husband and wife have hyphenated and also where just the wife has. I know one couple who created an entirely new name for the family out of letters of their two surnames. I actually kind of like that idea, but it also obscures lineage. Our families are very important to us. That wouldn�t have been the right choice for us, but it was for them. The only people I know who are not happy with the arrangement are a gay couple who wanted a single family name when they adopted kids, but decided against it because the couple, through a freakish coincidence, have identical first and middle names. The last names are the only way you can tell them apart as individuals on paper. But every one of these people has given it a lot of thought. Our names hold a lot of information about ourselves, like a small but indecipherable fragment of code. It is hard to make changes. Every now and then I feel a little odd about the fact that my brother�s wife now has the name I grew up with but I do not. But the complexities merely serve to link us together.

[second entry today]

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