Naming Them

By: Mariah Boone
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:24:14
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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.

As time went by, however, I was aware that the choice I had made did not always sit well with me. I expected and did not mind when my child’s friends called me Mrs. Thomas, and was pleasantly surprised when the staff at her school never did so, but I did mind some things. I minded very much that my daughter’s pediatrician’s office wanted to put her father’s name in the charts as the responsible party even though her health insurance was and always had been carried through my job. I minded as my child got older and started asking why I did not give her my last name instead.

At some point, when looking for good feminist media for my young daughter, I came across New Moon Magazine and noticed that the parents who had founded it had given one of their daughters her father’s last name and one of them her mother’s last name. I liked that. Before long, a family with two children joined our Quaker Meeting. One child had her mother’s last name and one child had his father’s last name. I was sold. I gave birth to my second daughter in 2004 and gave her my last name. I probably would have chickened out of my plan if she had been a boy because my husband had a venerable old family name chosen in case of a boy-baby and it seemed a little sad to me not to be able to give him the whole name. We had a girl, though, a wonderful girl. Her birth and naming made our system seem fair to me: one child with his name and one with mine.

Not everyone felt that way. My older daughter was not entirely thrilled at not having the same name as her sister, although she wanted to change her name, not the other way around; she’s a fan of matrilineage, it seems. My mother, not generally an old-fashioned type, was appalled. She thought it was just wrong for the sisters to have different last names which seemed a little odd to me because I always had a different last name from my siblings with whom I grew up – my father’s name. My siblings were the children of my mom and my step dad and had his name. Quite a few people mentioned this angle…that people would think they were “half sisters”. As a “half sister” myself, I have always found the label ugly and thought little of people’s need to make distinctions. Our daughters were our daughters. The fact that they are “whole sisters” confers only the status of being more likely organ donors for each other if they ever, God forbid, need a transplant of any kind.

The baby is still young, so our naming choices may cause stumbling blocks that I have not yet foreseen, but I am really happy with our names now. I put both of our last names on correspondence that is from the whole family and I feel like Boone is an equal party, not just some afterthought. I feel equal in our family. Names and labels are far from the most important things we have to struggle over, but they are still important. Names can tell us what we value, and it is important that we value each of us.

(this article first appeared in off our backs: the feminist news journal)

Mariah Boone is a mother, writer, social worker, Texas historian and the publisher of Lone Star Ma: The Magazine of Progressive Texas Parenting and Children's Issues. To read more, go to http://www.LoneStarMa.com.

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