Earlier this year, soon after Babyman’s birth & before handing in his birth registration forms, we changed our surnames so we all had the same surname. Wilde is a chosen name, not the surname either Liam or I were given by our parents at birth.
We talked about it a lot before we did it. Initially I suggested I take on his birth surname, without getting married. I decided against this because I felt less affinity with the name of his family of origin than I did with my own & I didn’t like the idea of “settling” for a name.
We had been talking about changing my name only vs choosing a family name for at least a year before we decided to choose something new (to us) & not connected in any way to either of our families of origin.
We discussed a lot of issues, including:
What will other people think?
Buuut, we can’t spend our lives worrying about what others think & ignoring the desire to do what makes us feel fulfilled. Right?
We can’t just choose to change the girlchild’s birth name, it’s not our right.
Yes, I actually thought this. Silly! Silly because we gave her birth name to her, we chose it in the first place. This was the biggest road block for me, Liam was into it, I was really getting stuck on changing a name she’d carried for 2.5yrs even though it wasn’t a name we’d chosen for her.
Patriarchy.
The idea that we deviate from what is the dominant culture surrounding family names in a patriarchy. By choosing a family name for ourselves we avoid the sense of man owning, & therefore naming, woman. (I understand this is not the way everyone sees it, yet it was something that came up for us)
Genealogy/family tree.
It’s not like our children won’t be able to track their ancestral heritage if they choose too. They’ll know their father’s “maiden name” (hehehe) & mine also, so they can just go looking it up using that information if they want to, same way I’d have to filter through many name changes if I were to trace my maternal lineage.
Funnily enough, the reason it took about a year from first floating the idea to actually following through with the act of renaming ourselves is because I was the one blocking it. It was my (half serious) suggestion originally, after discussing it for a whileLiam accepted it completely & wanted to do it immediately. I didn’t expect that, I expected resistance & I think I freaked out a bit when I didn’t meet it.
So we toyed with some names, we chose the one we liked the most went to the registry of births, deaths & marriages to hand in Babyman’s birth certificate registration complete with our new family name & a form for me, Liam & The Bubble.
As yet, we haven’t had a ritual to mark it for ourselves. It’s been a while now & we may not have a ritual at all. We don’t know how to go about it, what we want to include, whether we want to celebrate it ourselves or whether we want to make it a community celebration.
At the end of the day, ritual or not, we chose our family name & that in itself is a powerful enough ritual & acknowledgement of our committment to our family.
We chose the name Wilde because it felt like freedom. Names can carry a lot of power.
love you Kimba. Name choosing & changing is a very empowering process. i like the idea of people being able to reflect the changes in their learning & perspective throughout the years by changing their name, if they feel it’s necessary. It’s funny cos I used to be resistant to people doing it but then went ahead and changed my own name. People still ask me what my “real” name is, as if it has any relevance to them, like they are affronted that someone would do that. oh well!
x
The “real name” thing is odd to me. What do you have to gain by knowing what someone was named at birth? It doesn’t mean you know them better. It may give you something to judge, i.e.
“They had a perfectly acceptable name before and then they went and changed it to…”
I suppose the motivations for wanting to know the birth name of someone who has chosen their own name may be similar to the motivations for wanting to know what parents-to-be might like to name their unborn child. Those motivations are a mystery to me. Again, I assume it’s about judgement (but then, I’m always paranoid about judgement!). From my own experience of naming 2 children, I found an alarming number of people would ask me what names I had in mind and become quite offended if I told them I didn’t want to share the names we had been discussing. Those people who I did share some of our ideas with decided it was their right to tell me whether or not they thought the names we liked we “nice” or not.
I think it’s right to use the name a person uses to introduce themselves to you. This is something I feel particularly strongly about with first names, since I dislike being called “Kim”. I’d happily use my full name, “Kimberley” if I could do so with confidence that people are not going to shorten it to “Kim”. This is the sole reason I introduce myself as, and go by, “kimba”.
Anyway, love to you too Scoutt. How I miss you!