Naming Them

[dvatmq...@yahoo.com]

I kept my name when I married in 1995. I never expected that a choice
about so small a matter would cause much commotion, and it didn't, not
much. I did have a couple of people ask me if I respected marriage
(yes, so much so that I wish it were an option available to all my
friends), my husband (sometimes), etc. and I did experience the
obligatory chilliness about it from certain conservative relations. I
also got some trouble from the phone company about our listing. On the
whole, though, keeping my own last name did not seem like a very big
deal.
Then my daughter was born.
As we awaited her arrival, my husband and I considered many
possibilities when it came to a last name for our daughter. We had a
name agreement that involved me naming all girls and him naming all
boys, so the choice was mine, but I wanted us both to be happy with
that choice. A part of me does think that patrilineage is a patently
stupid custom. Even if it were not for the sexism inherent in such a
practice, it seems like a mighty uncertain way to track a family tree.
When a baby is born, everyone knows who gave birth to it - paternity
is often not so cut and dried. Still, it is not as if some of the
reason for giving children their fathers' names was not due to that
very concern - to protect a child's claim on a man and what he could
provide for the child. And it was not like I wasn't well aware that
such issues could still hold relevance in my child's life at some
point in the future, so I was not entirely sure that I wanted to turn
my back on that little evolutionary nudge. I wasn't sure that I didn't
want to, either, though. My husband and I definitely considered the
option of a hyphenated last name, both of our names, but the
hyphenated last name option really only makes sense until you start
thinking about when the hyphenated child has children. If little Boone-
Thomas wants to reproduce with Mussey-Hitt someday...well, what about
their children? It gets crazy pretty fast. There are plenty of other
options to consider and we considered many of them, but, in the end, I
just gave her my husband's last name. It seemed like the easiest thing
at the time and I had a lot of other things with which to occupy my
mental energy....

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