I don t remember much about the woman who changed my name. Though something in me desires to call her Rhonda, I d be lying if I said I remembered her name. Here s what I can say: She was middle-aged, with a clipped, smug manner, and she worked for the hospital at which I would have my first child. On an extremely hot and humid August day, less than a month before my son was born, Rhonda (let s just go with Rhonda) led my husband and I around labor and delivery, pointing out the room where visitors could wait and the nursery where our baby would get his first bath.
After the tour, Rhonda sat us down in her office to walk us through a mountain of pre-registration forms. The idea was to get everything important done in advance so that we d be free to be in the moment on the day the baby was born. When we got to the part about the birth certificate, Rhonda paused. She pointed at me. "So your name is Angelo." She pointed at my husband. "And his name is Parker. But you want the baby to be Parker, too?"
We said yes, this was right.
Rhonda looked at me, perturbed. "The baby has to have the same last name as you," she said. "If you re Angelo, the baby will be Angelo on the birth certificate. If you want the baby to be Parker, you have to be Parker, too."
As I type this, I could almost laugh at how farfetched it sounds. It sounds like something a witch in an Olsen-twins movie from the 90s would say. It s obvious, sitting here a near-decade later, that Rhonda was mistaken. "Wait, that s not true" is the undefeated instant reaction I ve gotten from every woman I ve ever shared this story with, starting with the nurse I relayed it to, confused, as I sat in that hospital three weeks later with a nine-pound, two-ounce boy in my arms. "You didn t have to change your name!" she said. "Who told you that?"
By then, it was too late. The same day Rhonda told me I had to be Parker, too, I flew from the hospital in a tearful, frustrated rage, squeezed my giant self into a booth at a fried-food place down the street, and resolved to change my name within the next twenty-four hours. (I don t know if Rhonda worked for Big Name or what, but she had told me to go for this—she was confident I had plenty of time to complete the process before my due date). Suddenly, a position I d committed to five years earlier, when I got married—I was not changing my name—blurred behind my hormonal, anxious upset over having overlooked something this big. I didn t push back. I didn t investigate. I flew into this-has-to-happen, just-get-it-done mode.
It wasn t until I got to the DMV the following day—an even hotter day, my ankles the size of courthouse pillars—and slid my current license across the counter that the magnitude of what I was doing hit. "Wait," I said, as the agent swept the wisp of plastic into a bin. "Can I actually have that back? It s just that it s my name." And then I started to cry! This was maybe a sign that I should have heeded to my husband s reaction to Rhonda: "Don t do it, if it s going to upset you. It seems like the kind of thing we can figure out later."
But the concept of later, when you are about to have your first baby, seems downright sinful. I felt like having one blank box or question mark on my BABY TO-DOS list when my water broke would be a fate worse than any other. I didn t just give up my identity, after Rhonda; I flung it away, sure it was better to follow Rhonda s lead than to fight for something I d had, at that point, for thirty years. She was right, by the way: Three weeks was plenty of time to erase the name I had been called for three decades.
I wouldn t go as far as saying I regret changing my name. I m good with being one of The Parkers on my holiday cards. I m eh-to-okay with being called Mrs. Parker at school, although there s always a quarter-beat where I look around pleasantly, wondering who that is. I am also the beneficiary of a super-loophole; I kept my name professionally, and I get to see it with fair regularity that way. My name still exists.
But I do regret the way I gave it up. Everyone I tell my Rhonda story thinks it s insane. It is, except for one part, I think: the timing. Looking back on my name-change moment makes me wonder why we don t always examine a woman s choice of name around the start of a family, rather than the start of a marriage. Studies done as recently as 2023 indicate that 79% of women take their partner s names after getting married. But why? Some women have a personal preference to align with one s partner—that s understandable. What s not is the default setting of the tradition. Very few women enter into marriage these days without something to their name—a job, a property, an Instagram handle. A name change disrupts those things, and has, outside of satisfying archaic tax procedures, no practical upside. Not until, if they do at all, children come along.
When children come along, there are undeniable benefits. Having the same name as your kids streamlines many parts, both formal and informal, of parenting. (Any mom who has said, "No, I go by _____" over and over and over can attest to this.) However, which same name is not always discussed, in the runup to baby. We think of household names as something settled, broadly speaking, at the wedding stage. But sometimes, when I look back at the Rhonda incident, I wonder if the strangest part of the whole thing wasn t the costly misinformation. Maybe it was the premise of the question: You want the baby to be Parker. We discussed a lot of things at the fried-food place that day, but neither of us raised the possibility of the baby, yeah, simply being Angelo.
Grooms taking brides names is so unusual, data on it doesn t seem to exist. But what if we framed lineage so that the question didn t concern brides and grooms so much as it did ensuing offspring, when that offspring actually, you know, ensued? The same way you simply can t know so much about motherhood before you re in it, I couldn t understand in those frantic August days that the shift in my name would be followed, lightning-quick, by shifts in my body, routine, work—everything having a child and making room for the care of them adjusts. I gained so much, but it was a lot to lose at once. Sometimes I wonder if the best case for matrilineal naming is a simple one: If I did anything else that took up a fraction of the time I have put into my children, my name would be on it. Period.
That s not to take away from my partner, whose life and body—not so much from carrying the children but from being climbed/whaled upon by them mercilessly—has also changed. But we have discussed and come to agreements regarding countless other things in our kids lives by taking into account what we think, how we feel, which option works best for us. We don t do anything else, when it comes to our kids, because it s just the way it is. It feels interesting to me, and a bit like a blindspot, that we didn t treat their names the same way—pre or post Rhonda.
I can t say exactly why, but my feelings around my name and how it changed for my children have only recently coalesced. The baby haze clears and it takes with it a certain desperation to get things exactly right—you got some of it right, and some of it wrong, and they re all still here, walking, with full sets of teeth. These days, when my changed name rings false to me, I just change it back. I don t see a world in which I d ever do that formally—it requires a court order (and, probably, a lot of delicate explanation). But my hand never learned to write my new name naturally, so I ve gone back to my original signature. Muscle memory is stronger than the mythical Rhonda. It overrides unexamined tradition.