hello bunny

Everyone knows that you have to pick and choose your battles. Not every single fight can be fought by one person, at least not without compromising one’s mental health, and perhaps even physical health, with all that bashing of heads against brick walls and whatnot.

So it was that I found myself, while eight months pregnant with my first child, changing my surname to my husband’s; something I hadn’t done when we got married six years previously and that I hadn’t envisaged doing at all. The feminist voice inside me screamed but I shut her up by telling myself that it wasn’t that big a deal, really; that I was only changing it from one man’s name (my father’s) to another and that the tradition had roots too far entrenched in society for my stance to make much of a difference. But mostly, I was just tired. I was tired (already) of having this conversation with people:

“So, will Mr. D (my surname) be attending the next scan with you?”

“Yes but he’s not Mr. D, he’s Mr. R.”

“Oh, I see, I’m sorry. I thought you were married.”

“We are but I didn’t change my name.”

“Oh. Okay. So what surname will the baby have?”

“Um, his I guess.”

“Oh.”

It wasn’t that I thought he or she was being judgmental of the fact I hadn’t changed my name or that I was embarrassed to be mistaken for an unmarried mother, but something bothered me nonetheless.

I had endured a rather painful pregnancy, with SPD so bad that I had trouble sitting still for any period of time and could often be found on my hands and knees underneath my desk at work, rocking back and forth in agony trying not to cry. Spasms of pain leapt through my back and wrapped themselves around my vertebrae like the fingers  of hot lightning that streak violently through the summer sky during an electrical storm. It felt as if my pelvis were the good-luck wishbone at a turkey feast, being pulled apart with feverish abandon. I couldn’t walk anywhere without a support belt on and even then it was difficult. Needless to say, I had a pretty miserable third trimester.

So when I thought about going through all that pain (not to mention labour!), upheaval and life-changing craziness and then not even getting to share my name with the baby I’d helped create and solely incubated, sustained and birthed…well, it made me quite upset, actually. I knew that, rationally and intellectually, it was just a name and shouldn’t matter what anyone else thinks or what social conventions dictate, but the desire to be a full part of this little family I was creating and not feel like an outsider or in any way detached or different from my little girl was very strong. So strong, in fact, that I gave up on trying to convince my husband to adopt a double-barrelled name with me (he’d grown up with one and hated it so much that he’d officially dropped the second part when he was a teenager) and decided to just take on his. At the time, I had no patience for anything I construed as complicated or a pain in the ass and this was one way to simplify things.

My husband never asked me to do this for him, by the way; it was all my own anxieties and the pressure that I was feeling to conform and be a ‘good mother’ and a ‘good wife’ by the messages all around me, every day, about what that entails. I bought into the idea that not submitting to this tradition would cause more difficulties for myself and confusion for my children than it was worth. And now, almost four years later, I can say that it has and it hasn’t. There hasn’t been any name confusion, certainly. All four of us have the same last name and it is admittedly quite convenient to just jot down ‘The R___ Family’ instead of listing all of the variations. I don’t get misaddressed forms and Christmas cards and paperwork is pretty straightforward.

But that feminist voice inside my head has never stopped whispering “Why’d you do it? Was your reason really good enough? What kind of example are you setting by bucking so many sexist traditions and gender roles but embracing this one without much of a fight? You’re not you any more, you’re somebody’s WIFE.” Sometimes I let that voice get to me and at others, I leave that inner battle well enough alone, content that I’ve made my choice and that there’s no going back now. Let that be someone else’s Waterloo, I say.

Still, I wish women didn’t have to make this decision at all as it brings so many questions of identity to the surface. If by not changing our names we are making some kind of political statement of independence, does that mean that if we do change our names we’ve willingly given up a part of ourselves just for the ease of form-filling and avoiding awkward social situations? Does that make me a (gulp) conformist?

What has been your experience with name-changing after marriage, if that’s an institution you’re involved in? If you aren’t married, have you had any problems with the name presumptions, especially if you have children? Do you ever regret your decision?

Photo credit