The Name Game is Getting Serious

When I got married it didn’t occur to me to change my name. I was too busy surviving a forced march through the bridal registry at Birks. I had no foresight to imagine needing, using or storing a dinner set for eight in our tiny rental kitchen just as I had no inkling why I would want to change my name.

Yet within weeks of cultivating the bud of our new family I wanted to show that even just the two of us, Robert and I, were a family. And today, while our marriage (two kids, two cats, one minivan) isn’t radical, the conventional last name doesn’t fit. Where am I, Elee Gardiner, in Mrs. Robert Kraljii? (As for the plates from Birks, they’re stacked neatly in their own sideboard and last Christmas I asked my sister for two more settings.)

When I thought of pitching out my father’s surname, Gardiner, simple ideas suddenly became complicated, loaded with emotional resonance. My only other experience changing my name was after my parents’ divorce when I tried on my mother’s name for a month. That year my father began what would become a stubborn birthday tradition, ordering personalized pencils with our full names on them in brittle gold lettering. They were cheap, painted pencils and they wrote with a cold grey line of lead. While my classmates personalized nifty Erasermate pens with the bite of their bicuspids, I toted a pencil case jammed with my full first, middle and last name. The zero cool factor of those pencils got me creamed in dodgeball but filial piety, I mean guilt, kept me from throwing them out.

Nineteen years after my father’s death, stray pencils are still surfacing in the junk drawer in our kitchen and reminding me how much this temporary name change bruised him and how those pencils were his bid to underline my identity. More importantly, I am the only one of my family not living in New England, a nexus of genealogic fetishization, where our family rites and burials still take place in a town named Gardiner. The name is a geographic talisman for me, keeping me connected to my people.

The hyphenate debate

As soon as word got out that we’d exchanged vows, gifts began arriving and they fell into two camps: the ones addressed to Elee Gardiner and Robert Kraljii and the ones addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Robert Kraljii which annoyed me because the postal outlet at the Seven Eleven wouldn’t let me pick them up without matching i.d. You could say the business end of marriage prompted the conversation/negotiation that trailed off after dinner one night, resumed during a walk for coffee and basically became the default setting for our conversational exchanges over the next few months.

We toyed with the idea of Robert changing his name to Gardiner. A high school classmate of mine did that in the 1990s and an ancestor, Robert Hallowell, had changed his name to Gardiner in the 1800s, to carry on his father-in-law’s estate. But Robert Gardiner is a well-used name in my family and completely obliterates Robert’s Slavic identity, already compromised by history. His father Jozefee Kraljii was born Kralj but added the double “i” in ballpoint pen to his passport as a sort of D.I.Y. witness protection program. Having escaped Tito’s Yugoslavia, he had no interest in being forced to return and complete military service. To this day Robert floats the idea of changing his last name back to “Kralj,” every six months or so because Kraljii isn’t a family name and there are no living male Kraljs left in the family in Slovenia. Names, like the people they supposedly call into being, are not perfect and unchanging. So we kept talking.

One of us proposed creating a hyphenated name for both of us. With names the sum of the parts is rarely greater than the whole and we rapidly realized few names come alive when hooked together. Gardiner-Kraljii was a clunker, Kraljii-Gardiner would be misheard as “algae gardener”. We thought of shortening and combining both names. Kralgard? Sounds like a furniture spray. Kradner? Nope. Garjii? That one was a contender merely because it had already shown up as a typo on direct mailings.

We took a whack at translating both names into Italian as an homage to his maternal heritage. Kralj means king in Slovene, which is re in Italian, so Robert tossed out ”Regiardiniero” and snorted derisively before I could react. At one point we actually trailed a finger through the phone book imagining we’d adopt a brand new (to us) name that proved too random. Elee Nguyen? No, thanks.

Mooch from friends?

“Let’s take James’s name,” Robert proposed, referring to our dear friend who wasn’t planning on spawning or marrying, but we nixed that when James told us how much he’d always hated his own name. “But you can have it if you want it,” he added generously.

In the meantime, when we went out with Robert’s sister, Julie Kraljii, they were addressed as the couple and I was assumed to be a friend. Traveling as this unintentional ménage-à-trois became completely irritating when room service waiters practically hi-fived Robert; the room was registered to Mr. and Mrs. Kraljii but I signed the bill as Elee Gardiner one morning, Julie signed it as Julie Kraljii the next.

“Enough!” I said, “Let’s just go with Kraljii Gardiner and we’ll deal with the matter of offspring later.” Sure, it doesn’t roll off the tongue but it is an honest reflection of who I am. The first time I signed my new name on my passport I had a perverse thrill seeing all those vowels lined up. At work, editors complained about my by-line. Art directors groused as they attempted to squeeze it into format. Another freelancer envied it as eye-catching.” You may not know how to pronounce it but you’ll certainly recognize it,” he said.

One morning over cinnamon buns Robert announced that he thought he’d stick with just Kraljii, without the Gardiner. Not much I could say to that. And truthfully, by that point I didn’t really care. At least we had some part of the equation in common and I didn’t feel I’d abandoned myself. Like drinking, I figured if I wasn’t uneasy with it I didn’t have a problem; no one can tell you your name fits.

Some days I don’t have the energy to spell out the whole shebang, and honestly, the furnace guy just needs to know he’s booked for the Kraljii household. I suppose forgoing the hyphen was my way of garnering a little flexibility. Other days when I’m dealing with business or family back east, the Kraljii part becomes more like a well-loved middle name.

Cultural assumptions

Dealing with the order of maiden and married names is a cultural roadblock more than a personal one for Tania Fierro, who I met through our children’s preschool. She and her husband Pedro Cortina, the founders and directors of Innerland.ca, have been bumping up against the Anglo preference for one paternal family name since they moved to Vancouver from Mexico City three years ago with their toddler, Sebastian Cortina Fierro. In Mexico, where children carry the maternal surname after the paternal, Sebastian is officially Sebastian Cortina Fierro, but the immigration forms for Canada didn’t accommodate that. He’s Sebastian Cortina here.

Tania, who was known as Tania Fierro Dobbs (Dobbs is her mother’s name) in Mexico, kept her name when she married, like many women all over the world who came of age after the women’s movement. Her married name, Cortina, sits at the end of her other monikers like a silent letter until it’s pronounced in formal settings, i.e.: Tania Fierro Dobbs de Cortina. In Mexico even the older generations of conservative women are sure to include their maiden name in official settings, a practice that if grafted onto their Canadian counterparts would paint them as raging feminists. English protocol is no fan of digression, it’s more cut-to-the-point-who’s-the-dad? Here in Vancouver she is frequently called Tania Cortina, which is technically correct but irritating nonetheless. As she says, “First of all, that’s not me. And also, I really miss my mother’s name here in Vancouver. That’s part of who I am.”

Some cultures put the focus on first names, unless someone muscles in and decides to change their practices for them. Years ago when I worked with Giao, a Montagnard man from Vietnam, he was considering marriage and preparing to take his American girlfriend’s last name. His tribe’s tradition of tracing family groups through the shared first letter of a single name (Giao’s relatives’ names all begin with “g”) confounded the missionaries who “discovered” his tribe in the 1950s. The priests amused themselves by doling out last names with unclerical levity. Giao, a dark-eyed charmer who met the foreigners clad in a loincloth, was immediately nicknamed “Valentino,” which became his last name on official documents. He has no deep bond with the name and it’s hardly perplexing why his U.S.-raised girlfriend didn’t share the priests’ joke.

Five names in a lifetime

Icelandic culture is also based on first names so it’s no big deal that married women commonly keep their own names; own being a relative description because last names are generated from the mom or dad’s first name. For example, the son of a woman named Eiríkur Gudmonsdottir would be given the last name Eiríkursson, meaning Eiríkur’s son. His sister would be Eiríkursdottir, Eiríkur’s daughter. The same children who took their dad Jón’s name would be Jónsson and Jónsdottir according to their gender. Some families of four have four different last names, an idea that strikes fear into the heart of the North American nuclear family. The practicality of the system delights me - such logical choices! – but my husband, Mr. Big Picture, thinks it’s completely impractical. I don’t know any Icelanders personally to vouch for its efficacy but Iceland’s phone book, yes, that’s singular, is an alphabetical listing of the islanders’ first names.

Years ago, in the time of the non-global village, people could shed names like snakeskin and grow into new identities without worrying about losing medical coverage because their CareCard didn’t match a file name. Some of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, Muskoki and Seminole peoples took new names as many as four of five times as a rite of passage after life-altering events. These changes were not impetuous. They were marked by ceremonies of preparation; fasting and feasting that lasted days.

For Litsa Chatzivasileiou, an Assistant Professor of Spanish at UBC, the goal is to preserve her sense of self through the journeys of marriage and motherhood, not change it. She knew she wanted her children to carry her name as well as her husband’s, computer programmer Ray Blaak. They shortened her long Greek name to Hatzi, and combined it with his, making their children the only two Hatzi-Blaaks on Earth.

“But you wouldn’t believe the problems I got when I immigrated and didn’t take Ray’s name,” she told me over coffee. A Canadian government representative told her she had incorrectly filled out the forms for her visa. Then the Greek consulate suggested that her son’s forms were wrong and refused to issue him a passport saying a child could take either the mother's or the father's name but not a made up hyphenated and altered name. Her insistence on managing her own identity – she was planning on being called “Litsa” instead of “Mama” when she was pregnant with her son -- made the process worthwhile for her. “But I do love it when we get mail addressed to Mr. and Mrs. Hatzi-Blaak, that the parents are getting the kids’ name,” she laughs.

Nutmeg to your taste?

At weddingmanual.co.uk, where thousands of men and women wail into the void of cyberspace about the anxiety of post-nuptial name changing, a thread about the supposed correlation between a woman’s name change and the marriage’s survival rate set off a protracted discussion that turned tense and personal. “I smell a troll,” one person posted in response to a man named Larry who insisted a woman isn’t serious about a commitment to coupledom unless she forsakes all trappings of her single life. He held up the example of his own wife’s unquestioning adoption of his name as proof. “Thank God there are still sheep in the world,” another poster added sarcastically.

Sometimes knots untangle themselves, or as in the case of a university friend of mine, the knots never get tied up at all. Jennifer Hall, a Vancouver communications consultant, inadvertently skipped over the issue of changing her name because she moved to Thailand two weeks after her wedding to artist Peter Robinson. By the time they settled in Bangkok it was too confusing and time-consuming to change her visas and paperwork. So far, seven years into their life together having distinct names is a convenience for the two, who sometimes work together from their home on Bowen Island. Hall likes the fact that clients don’t assume that Robinson, a graphic designer and illustrator, is part of a pre-packaged duo. “They can see that we are both hired because we’re good at what we do, as opposed to be being some family two-for-one deal.”

But what about the kids?

“I’ve thought of hyphenating but “Robinson-Hall” sounds like a place, not a person. I can imagine changing the order around but our kids will probably just have Pete’s last name,” she says. That’s what Robert and I decided when our daughter was born. I wanted them to have a clean slate hyphen-wise in case they hooked up in later life with a hyphenator. Vetoing and choosing five given names between the two kids satisfied my emotional input into their naming. That got my familial ya-yas out.

I have a theory about where all this angst and complication about last names is taking us. Parents are choosing first names for their children that no last name, no matter how mellifluous or clunky, can wrestle away from the spotlight. Imagine a kindergarten classroom peopled with Chardonnay, ChiChi, Commander, Disney, Ikea, Jeneral, Maksymilian, Mysteek, Nutmeg, Phaith, Sushi, Tahini, Umajesty, YouYou, and Zurrenity. They, all real children born in 2004, may grow up to feel the issue of last names is a non-starter.

Elee Kraljii Gardiner is a writer in Vancouver.