Doin' it

Today I did it.

IT.

Today I changed my name after marriage. (What did you think I meant? Pervert.)

It took me a long time to decide what I wanted to do about my name. I liked my maiden name. It served me well for 27 years, and I didn’t see changing legal status as sufficient reason to chuck it away. One concerned soul told me that not taking Ben’s name was an insult, but I figured you can make that argument the other way around as well, since it’s not as though his surname is intrinsically superior (in fact, it’s a common sounding but unusually spelled name, so you could probably argue that in terms of pure usefulness, mine has the upper hand). And I wasn’t going to change it “so I’d have the same name as the children,” as some people gravely recommended, because I think it’s presumptuous to assume that any potential sproglings would automatically take the father’s name in the first place. Personally, I think the name should be passed down from the person who carries them around for nine months and then goes through twelve hours of agonizing labor. But that's just me.*

When I first told Ben that I was uncertain about changing it, he was supportive but a little confused as to why I wouldn’t want to. So I asked him if he’d consider changing his. “Of course not, it’s who I am!” Uh-huh. Then he got it.

So why did I do it? There are a couple reasons. First, I’m not in a profession where surrendering my maiden name would be a potential blow – for those whose reputations rely on name recognition or published research to establish them in their field, a name change could bring considerably more complications. Second – and you may not believe this after everything I’ve written – I do actually like the perceived unity of a joined name between Ben and myself...just not at the expense of the perceived unity to my family.

So, I still didn’t want to give mine up totally. As I said – I like my name. Hyphenation was an obvious solution, but I’ve never liked the way hyphenated names looked. Something about that little dash screams bourgeois to me. Snub me if you like, but that’s how I feel. A common trend right now is to either drop your middle name and use your maiden name in its place, or to reinvent it as a second middle name, but neither of these appealed; I like my middle name too much to discard it (even if it did inspire The Cousins to call me “Roach” in my formative years), and my maiden name didn’t really seem to work as a second middle name – it felt forced and awkward.

And then I saw something that inspired me. Jada Pinkett Smith. Dual surnames, no hyphen. It seems like such a little thing to remove that dash, but visually, it made all the difference in the world (petty, but a degree in Fine Art makes you pretty damn attuned to the visual). Now that I could work with. It retained my original name, gave me the dual unification I was looking for, and got around the pesky hyphen.

Over the last few months, I slowly changed my surname in social settings – on my email, in Facebook (yes, I’m one of THOSE people), introducing myself to people with both names…just sort of waggling a toe in the water and seeing how I liked it. And it was fine. So, today I went to the RTA (Oz’s version of the DMV) and asked to change my name. Thirty minutes later, I was in the car with a new identity. And a new, less flattering photo on my license (how was I supposed to know they would want to take a new picture? the other one is only six months old!).

Yeah, they spell "license" differently here. They also spell aluminum as "aluminium" because they're freaks. We won't even go into the whole issues of adding random U's to words.

Now I just have to call up all the companies I do business with (banks, credit cards, social security, phone, etc.) and then make approximately 35,148 copies of our marriage certificate and my new license to mail out to said companies as proof. *sigh*

*For the interested parties out there: we’ve agreed that our children will have a dual surname, just like me, so I guess Ben will be the odd man out. And no, I don’t think this will cause the little brutes any unnecessary hardship or confusion; in some cultures, multiple surnames are quite common and those children don’t seem to suffer for it. I have faith that our kids will be intelligent enough to cope with five extra letters in their name without suffering a nervous breakdown or going through a lifelong identity crisis.