Dear Swistle,
I read your blog religiously and with the recents posts involving mother’s last name issues and feelings of resentment/pressure surrounding names, I decided it was time to write you myself. My situation is a two part question. I will try to be brief but I have a feeling it’s going to be long so feel free to cut it down if necessary!
I am currently pregnant (due in April) with our second child, a girl. We have a two year old son named James Reave (spelled differently). He goes by James exclusively and is named for my dad. His middle name is my husband’s beloved grandmother’s maiden name. I love his name and am happy to have honored the people we did. The resentment sets in when I start to think about his last name. I did not change my last name upon marrying and as I am the last member of my family to carry the name, I have particularly strong feelings about it. I always secretly imagined my husband taking my name and my children carrying it on, and though I did mention this desire occasionally, it was never seriously discussed as I think my husband and I both realized we weren’t willing to deal with the fall-out that would inevitably occur if we broached the subject with our families. Looking back, I wish I had cared less about what others thought and had had the courage to push for a real discussion on the matter. We contemplated giving our son my last name as a second middle name, but were hesitant to saddle him with such a long and clunky name. When it came time to fill out the birth certificate paperwork, I was too distracted to care much one way or the other and it wasn’t included. We almost gave him my last name as his only middle name but because we were naming him after my dad, it seemed strange for him to have my dad’s exact name with my husband’s last just tacked on the end. Hyphenating would have been the ideal compromise but both of our names are long and cumbersome and it would have made for a 20 letter last name. My last name also sadly doesn’t make for a desirable first name. I thought that I would just move on from this but as I begin to register him for activities and preschool, I am constantly reminded that we don’t share a name and it makes me sad. I am tempted to take my husband’s name but I feel like I’m giving up some of my identity and there is also the unfortunate issue of my name sounding terrible with his. My question is, should we at this point legally change our son’s name to include my maiden name as his second middle name? Do you know how much of a hassle that is at this point? Is there another solution I haven’t considered? I had thought that perhaps if we had another son we would just give him my last name as his middle but we are having a girl instead and it’s just not the name I envision for my daughter. Which brings me to my next quandary.
Ironically, in light of the conundrum surrounding my last name, my mother’s family has a matriarchal tradition of naming each first girl after her mother, Sarah. Although I go by my middle name, my first name is Sarah. My mother, grandmother, and great grandmother were all Sarah and the line of Sarahs continues further back still with a couple of all male generations mixed in. For as long as I can remember, my future daughter has always been referred to as Sarah by everyone in my family, as if there were no other option. It’s only now that we’re expecting a girl (who will almost certainly be our last child) that I have come to realize that we actually do have a choice in the matter. I’m torn because I love the idea of continuing this tradition that makes me feel connected to my mother’s family but on the other hand, I feel like I’m giving up the opportunity to pick my only daughter’s name. Sarah is a fine name but feels slightly plain and overused to me and as it is my mom’s name, it seems a bit strange for both of my children to be called the same names as my parents. I realize we could move Sarah to the middle name position, but that seems to water down the tradition somewhat. We have considered naming her Sarah and calling her Sadie, but we’re just not sure Sadie feels quite right. Where we seem to have landed for the moment is to name her Sarah but call her by a middle name of our choosing. My hesitation with this of course is the hassle that comes with being named one thing and called another. I have been frustrated by this my entire life and to now be contemplating doing it to my daughter feels a little wrong. On the other hand, I survived it and can now appreciate the significance and meaning behind my name. The name my husband and I keep coming back to is Sarah Emmeline. Emmeline, though not a family name, feels special. I like the connection it has to multiple suffragettes and women’s rights activists as well as it being the name of the title character in a book about female independence that I enjoyed reading. Additionally, it was the name of my first cabbage patch doll, and as a result, it’s a name I have always had a soft spot for. While I do love the name, something is keeping me from completely committing. It is definitely my husband’s first choice and he has told our son the name, who has now taken to calling her Baby Emme in the sweetest little voice that melts my heart. But is Emme too cutesy? Will Emmeline constantly be mispronounced? (I prefer the Emma-line, rhyming with pine pronunciation). Does it work with James or is it too uncommon alongside a top 10 boys name? Does it sound like a trendy, made-up name as one of my friends suggested? Other names we like but that don’t feel quite right are:
Clara
Celia
Charlotte
Kate
Eliza/Elizabeth
Linnea (I love, husband hates)
Adeline
Isabella (family name but too popular)
Cora
Maggie (we don’t like any of the longer name options)
Georgia (if we had a boy, George would almost certainly have been the name so I want to hang onto it in case a boy were to come along)
I’d love to hear your thoughts on the best option for us. Please feel free to suggest new names or ones from our list that we should reconsider. I’m sorry for the incredibly long post but I would be so appreciative of any guidance you may be able to offer on these naming dilemmas! And I’ll be sure to send an update!
Thank you!!
L.
As time passes, I feel increasingly incredulous at the way I considered Paul so progressive just because he was WILLING TO DISCUSS other options than going with his surname. And at how both of us concluded that there was nothing else that was worth the hassle and confusion—as if “having someone periodically make an incorrect assumption about our surname” would have been so terrible, and “me having to give up my family name and use his family name for ALL OF MY CHILDREN” was so much lighter a load.
And I can’t believe I felt as if I were really getting my way to have my surname put in as the children’s second middle name. Not even their first middle name, but the SECOND one. The one that gets left off of many forms that don’t have room for two. I’m still glad we did that rather than doing nothing, but it feels like being grateful for crumbs.
My hope is that the way you and I are feeling, which is the way I have noticed a lot of other adult women feeling, is a feeling that will move like electricity down to the next generation of women: that THEY will think, “Why would I give up my OWN name and take HIS name?? That’s insane!” and then also NOT give all the children his name so that she ends up the only one not in the family surname club. My hope is that if we as a society can’t come up with a fair solution that makes sense for every family, then we as a society are going to make room for a lot of different ways to do surnames, and that most of those ways will equally represent both parents (and/or average out to equal representation), and that we as a society will stop acting as if that’s weird. We’ve had comments on surname posts that make me wonder if there’s something in the water—like, women commenting that they don’t think using the father’s surname for the children should in any way mean the mother should get any more say in the rest of the name, because that’s just normal and doesn’t count. AS IF THAT IS NOT, AT ITS CORE, THE MOST IMPORTANT DECISION OF THE ENTIRE PROCESS. Which family do these children belong to? Which family matters? Who is head of the family, as symbolically shown by his spouse and children taking his name? What name goes over the door, on the mailbox, in the phone book, in the newspapers? What name goes onward down the family tree, and which one is abandoned? THIS STUFF MATTERS ENORMOUSLY.
In moments of regret and societal despair, I have fantasized about dropping my husband’s surname from my own name and from my children’s names. I grew those children in my body, I have done the vast majority of their care over the years: if they must be marked with one family name or the other, they should be marked with MINE. It is interesting to me that when I do consider this, what I worry about is the apparent symbolic attack on Paul: if I drop his surname, if I give his surname to the children only as a second middle name, how can that represent anything but the most enormous slap in the face? (This is when I pause, wondering if anyone else is thinking as I then do about what an enormous slap it is to the mother and the mother’s family, when her name is preemptively stripped from her and from all her future descendants.)
About your son’s name. I feel almost weary as I root for the option to change his name to include your surname as a second middle: it feels like so much trouble, and for crumbs, and I don’t know how much hassle is involved but I expect a fair amount, and I hesitate to push anyone to deal with city hall about anything, when I myself would almost rather perish. But—when my eldest graduated high school, and they read his full name and one of those names was my birth surname, it is hard to explain how glad I was. I did not even slightly wish we had given him a shorter or less complicated or nicer-sounding name; if anything, I only wished we had hyphenated, so that we could have heard my name every day instead of once in 18 years. It gave me this feeling like…like names are IMPORTANT, not decorative. Like they are HISTORY and they MEAN something! Yes, there are names that would have been PRETTIER, but my family name doesn’t need to be pretty in order to be important.
There was a girl in Rob’s graduating class who had an almost startlingly complicated/clunky hyphenated surname. I am trying to think of an example that would communicate the feeling/sound of the name without giving away anything about the name, and I am failing. BOTH surnames are impossible to spell and pronounce. One of them is four syllables, the other is three. They don’t sound good together. And yet, weeping my way through the graduation ceremony, I thought, “Why didn’t WE do that??” Her name doesn’t have to “sound nice.” Her name communicates her ancestry, and IT INCLUDES HER MOTHER. Why is “sounding nice” more important than “INCLUDING HER MOTHER”?
How often, I wonder, do women drop the idea to use their own surname for the children because the name doesn’t sound nice? Compare that to how often we decide not to use the father’s surname just because it doesn’t sound nice. I went to school with a kid whose surname was Butt, and another whose surname was Dick. If those had been the mother’s surname, would there be a chance in hell of the children having those names anywhere within their names? But because it was the FATHER’S surname, it was worth the constant embarrassment. This is one of the many ways we reveal our beliefs about the relative value and importance of the parents’ surnames.
Every family that starts with anything except One Woman + One Man has to figure out the surname thing without falling back on the tradition of male names dominating, AND THEY ARE ALL MANAGING TO FIND SOLUTIONS that don’t involve one of them getting credit for agreeing it sucks that the only sensible solution is to go with tradition. One Man + One Woman families have some significant catching up to do in this area.
I am about to suggest an idea that I didn’t have the courage to do myself. I’m essentially saying to you, “I played it safe and went the nice comfy easy route that everyone understands, but you, YOU, should do the uncomfortable thing.” So I’d like to start by saying that you can trust me to 100% understand if you DON’T do it and instead do exactly as I did. I truly, deeply get it. But if we forget for a moment what the norms are, and we just look at the situation we have in your one single family, here is what we have:
1. Your husband, with his own birth surname
2. You, with your own birth surname
3. Your son, with your husband’s birth surname
4. Your daughter, with ______
Society is a mess, but your one single family can be balanced, surname-wise. If you like, you could change your son’s name to include your surname as a second middle name, and give your daughter her father’s surname in that same position. You and your husband could change your own names, taking the other one’s surname as a second middle name. (Perhaps wait and do this later, when the kids are older and it isn’t such a major ordeal to even get to the store for eggs, let alone get to city hall to do paperwork. You can make a date of it, maybe for a significant anniversary, while the kids are in school: first city hall, then lunch, then maybe a museum.)
I don’t know how to vote on the Sarah tradition. I have mixed feelings about naming traditions: on one hand, I find them touching and cool; on the other hand, they can cause such unnecessary pressure—and why does one person gets to name all the future generations? I strongly believe everyone should get to name their own babies. And especially when things get to the point that no one is actually using the revered name in daily life but instead just putting it on paperwork, it starts to seem like maybe no one really wants to do this tradition and it should stop. And I agree it seems odd to have your two kids named after your parents. I’m going to put this in list form:
1. The name Sarah would only be on the paperwork.
2. This was your own naming situation, and it has frustrated you your entire life.
3. It feels a little wrong to you to do this to your daughter.
4. The name Sarah feels plain and overused to you.
5. You lose the opportunity to choose your only daughter’s name.
6. You don’t like the idea of your two children having the same names as your parents.
Weigh this against the downside of using Sarah as a middle name: it “seems to water down the tradition somewhat.” It absolutely DOES dilute the honor, but perhaps it is high time for that dilution to happen, and well worth it.
But I can also see how, for various reasons, you might decide to continue the tradition. In which case, I am strongly in favor of Sarah Emmeline, called Emmeline. Emme is not too cutesy; if it becomes too cutesy, you will stop using it and use something else (Emmeline, Emma, Em, Ems). Emmeline will occasionally be mispronounced/misspelled, but within normal range. It works beautifully with James and doesn’t seem too uncommon next to it. It is not a trendy or made-up name; your friend was mean to say that, as well as wrong.
I feel like you are under a lot of pressure here. There is the intense societal pressure to use your husband’s surname for the kids. There is intense family pressure to use the name Sarah for your daughter. And now you have pressure from Swistle, trying to make you give your daughter your own surname AND dilute the family naming tradition. All of this while you’re pregnant.
Well. I will say this: my own vote is for Emmeline Sarah YourSurname (or, if you change your son’s name to James Reave YourSurname HisSurname, then Emmeline Sarah HisSurname YourSurname). But if you go with Sarah Emmeline YourSurname, or Sarah Emmeline HisSurname, I will understand. There is no one single option that is obvious and solves all the issues and makes everyone happy, and all of us have to weigh the pros and cons and then choose the solution we think will give us the least grief in the long run. I believe I may have chosen wrong, but that doesn’t mean it would be the same for you.
Name update:
Dear Swistle,
I’m sorry for the delayed update but wanted to let you know our final decisions after the birth of our daughter! I can’t thank you and your readers enough for your kind words of encouragement and affirmations that my feelings and desires were valid. While I absolutely loved the idea of passing my surname on to my daughter (and am excited to see a recent poster going this route), I couldn’t stop myself from thinking, “But what about James?!” I realized it was all or nothing for me and decided it was more important to me for us all to be a cohesive family unit that shared a name. Being an only child with divorced parents probably contributes to this extra strong desire for unity :) We decided it made the most sense to make my surname the second middle name for all of us. Not incredibly original I know, and I agree with you Swistle, it feels like crumbs. While this was not my ideal solution, I feel satisfied enough with this arrangement and will look forward to hearing my surname read aloud at my children’s graduation ceremonies. Unfortunately, it seems I’m not doing much to further our cause, but I do hope that others will have the courage to challenge tradition and that societal norms will have changed enough for our daughters to have an easier time making these tough decisions.
As for the first name/middle name debate, your comments and the comments of your readers truly helped free me from any sense of obligation I was feeling about using Sarah and I decided to see what felt right when we met her. When I saw her, I knew I wanted her to be a part of the (now seemingly unending) line of Sarahs. I know I’m just kicking the can down the road, but in that moment it felt like an honor and not a burden to be able to pass along the tradition and to share something special with her. I’ll do my best to make it clear to her that this tradition does not need to continue! So Sarah Emmeline (called Emmeline or Baby Emme) it is. Thank you again!!
L.
