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Broke Wife, Big City
A
writer by any other name
By Aprill Brandon
When I was in college, I
once got into a fight with a
boyfriend because I said if we ever got married, I was keeping my
maiden name.
To him, apparently this statement meant I was some sort of scary nutjob
closeted hippie feminist that ate pieces of the Constitution for
breakfast.
But my reasoning was much
more simple. My decision was
merely motivated by the fact that I'm the last one in my large extended
family
that still has my biological grandfather's surname. I just wanted to
keep that
name going for as long as I could.
Luckily, the man I did
marry understood this desire and
since he was the last in his family carrying his grandfather's surname,
we
ended up coming to a nice compromise, where I would keep my family's
name going
in long-forgotten articles and blogs and our future unholy spawn would
take his
name.
Boom. Done deal.
Except it wasn't. Not
really. When my stepdad bought me a
plane ticket out of the goodness of his heart, he put Aprill Huddle,
leading to
a rather intimate patdown by a TSA agent when they discovered it didn't
jive
with my license. When I was maid of honor for a friend's wedding, in
the
program I was listed as Aprill Huddle. The majority of our mail says
"Mr.
and Mrs. Huddle" and I'm often called Mrs. Huddle in public.
Which, to be honest, I
don't really mind. I've been called
worse (including some painful years in high school and college where my
nickname was "Chunky Bob").
However, I was surprised
a married couple having two
different last names, no hyphen within sight, is not quite as common as
I would
have thought. So it should have come as no surprise to me when I saw
that a
recent survey found that 50 percent of Americans would support a law
requiring
a woman to take her husband's last name.
But it still was.
Fifty percent? Really? I
mean, I understand the tradition of
taking your husband's last name and I think it's a lovely way to
symbolize that
you are now a family. But making a law requiring it?
Come on, this is America.
A country where celebrities can
name their children Audio Science (actress Shannyn Sossamon), Pilot
Inspektor
(actor Jason Lee) and Moroccan (Mariah Carey's demon seed). Where
celebrities
themselves can decide to go by one word, like Cher or Madonna, or in
the most
extreme cases, simply change their name to an unpronounceable symbol,
and then
change it to The Artist, and then change it back again to the original
one word
name of Prince. Where a normal kid named Sean Combs can be Puff Daddy
and then
later P. Diddy and then later still Puff the Magic Diddly or whatever
he's
going by now.
On the same note, this is
the land of the free and the home
of the brave reality TV stars who actually choose to go by ridiculous
monikers
such as Snooki, The Situation and J-Woww.
This is a nation where
spelling is a fluid concept and Paige
can be spelled Payj, Rachel can be Raychelle, Max can be Mhaxx, and
Kimberly
can be Kymberleigh. Where apostrophes know no bounds: De'Shawn'a,
Se'Heira,
Ce'Qwoia.
This is the melting pot
of the world, where little kids with
Polish surnames featuring four Z's, three Y's and 12 vowels can play
alongside
little Asian children with the hard-to-pronounce-for-white-people last
name of
Nguyen in peace and harmony. Where girls named Christi and Sammi and
Mari can
dot their i's with stupid, little hearts on legal documents.
Where a fourth-grader
from Ohio can decide one day to add an
extra L to her name on a whim because there were three other girls with
her
same name and she was tired of being referred to as "April B." Not to
mention, I could go right now and for a reasonable fee, legally change
my name
to Scrappy McDoo if I really wanted to.
Like Shakespeare said,
what's in a name?
Well, in America, it's
anything you want.
And in my, A'prylll
B'ran'don's, opinion, we should keep it
that way.
Can’t get enough of
Aprill? Can’t wait until next week?
Check out her website at http://aprillbrandon.com/
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