Call Me by My Name

Trying on my wedding dress aged 27

I changed my last name when I got married. I thought that the idea of belonging to someone was wildly romantic. I wanted to be subsumed and owned. I wanted the ring that signals possession and I wanted to lose myself in his surname. But a small voice fought to keep something of myself- even though that self was actually the name of my father- so I continued to work under my maiden name, Curry. Twenty three years later, the daily hassle and occasional illegality of living between two identities has become too much. If you think I’m alone in this, read The Problem That Has Two Names in The New York Times by Pamela Paul. I nearly kissed the screen when I read it.

The process of trying to officially revert back to my maiden name becomes my full time job. Every woman I speak to, (without fail, it’s a woman), laughs kindly and knowingly and says that it’s almost impossible to live under both names but also, you guessed it, achingly difficult to revert back to the one identity. The receptionist at my hospital says that female doctors have this problem every day. The bank teller says that she’s having the same problem and we end up laughing and chanting silly rhymes about the patriarchy. The atmosphere feels festive and charged and funny and slightly subversive. She is 51 and says that she only got married two years ago. She looks at me, suddenly serious and asks me why she gave up the name that she’d had for half a century. Her colleague comes over and says she’s about to get married and she’s torn between keeping her own name and changing it. She has kids and says she wants the same name as them.

She then breaks the news that the banking system won’t let me change my name back unless I get divorced. This feels crazy. ‘But I still love my husband’, I laughingly protest. She says that the software is likely designed by a man, someone who has never had to walk the tightrope of a dual identity. We share and we talk. After being alone for so long it feels delicious to chat. Why didn’t our husbands ever consider taking our names when we married, we ask. Why did it feel romantic to give away something of ourselves when that wasn’t even a question for our partners? Suddenly I want my birth name back very fiercely. It feels important to have this to cling onto, amongst the flotsam and jetsam of the last five years. I have lost so much and like a toddler, I cry out into the ether: I want my name.

Today I went to my accountants, with Dan, to have my deed poll certificate witnessed. And now it’s official- I no longer bear the name of my husband. So what, you may think, what’s in a name? But in the ocean of loss and abandonment and the sheer wretched carnage, Dan has been my rock and my sanity. And he has been far more than my other half because most of me slipped under the water for a good while. So it feels rejecting to strip myself of a profound connection with my favourite person. When I signed the form I started to cry because somehow it did feel like getting a divorce- a renting, a parting, yet another thing to grieve. But as I write this afternoon Dan is still here, behind me, quietly reading, even though I now bear the name of my father again. The small voice that spoke to me nearly a quarter of a century ago is also still there, and she knows that it’s time for me to stop hiding behind all of the heavy monikers that are placed on women’s shoulders.

I am a fatherless daughter. I am a mother whose beloved bairn has gone far away. I am a sister without a brother. I am a woman without ovaries. I am a wife without her husband’s name. I am me.