About My New (Old) Last Name

On reclaiming an identity I never planned to lose

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You may have noticed that I have a new last name. Or, more accurately, I once again have my old last name, the last name I had for the first 28 years of my life.

I never really wanted to change my last name. For one, I liked the name I had. It just seemed so strange to change it, to alter my identity in such a fundamental way, to get used to a new blend of vowels and consonants rolling off my tongue.

Also, changing my last name was a lot of work. I’d already put a lot of work into my wedding and now I had yet another marriage-related project that only peripherally included my new husband. I had to take PTO to visit the social security office, then make countless phone calls and provide all sorts of documentation. I even had to mail a copy of my marriage certificate to Southwest Airlines so I could still have access to the miles I’d accrued.

There was another reason I was hesitant about the change. I had a book published, albeit by a very small publisher, under my original name. I planned to write more books, and I didn’t want my dozen readers who weren’t related to me to get confused. (I don’t actually know if I had a dozen readers who weren’t related to me. A stranger did once message me on Facebook to tell me that the book changed her life, and I certainly didn’t want to confuse her.)

But marriage was about compromise, and besides, I could rationalize my husband’s reasons for wanting me to change my name. He had already changed his last name, twice. The first time, when his mother changed his name to match that of his stepfather, he hadn’t been given any say in the matter. The second time, as soon as he was legally able to, he changed it back.

His family life had always been fractured, and it was important to him that we had the same last name. It signaled a sense of cohesion he’d never had.

I understood my husband’s desire to reclaim his original last name and to share it with me, but it also struck me as odd that in the process, we’d both end up honoring his abusive, alcoholic, and largely absent father. Not his mother, who actually raised him, or either of my parents, who actually raised me.

It didn’t really occur to me that we could do something different altogether. I did once suggest we both take my last name, though the suggestion was partially made in jest, and my then-fiancé took it that way. I knew that I sure as hell didn’t want to hyphenate our names, or our future kids’ names. I’d grown up during the last-name-hyphenation peak in the ’80s and ’90s, and I found hyphenated last names both awkward and shortsighted. It wasn’t really a trend that could be carried on through generations. If my kids got married, were they really going to further hyphenate an already-hyphenated name?

Growing up in San Francisco, I knew my fair share of married couples trying to buck convention. My mother had taken on my father’s last name, but many mothers I knew had kept theirs. I hated addressing thank you notes and Christmas cards to these families. How should I account for the rogue woman with the different last name? I could understand a woman keeping her last name to challenge the patriarchy (though “patriarchy” was not in my vocabulary back then), but still, I found it incredibly weird that she ended up with a different last name from the children she carried, birthed, and breastfed.

In the end, my fiancé and I agreed that I would legally take on his last name, but my “pen name” would remain as it was. I believed I had an illustrious writing career ahead of me, and besides, I’d spent my entire childhood practicing my autograph. I was particularly attached to the loops and curls of the “G” that began my last name. One of my best friend’s last name was “Garcia,” and we had an ongoing argument (which I look forward to rekindling) about whose signature boasted the best “G.”

The “T” that would begin my new last name offered far fewer opportunities for looping and curling.

Alas, after I got married, that illustrious writing career never quite materialized. I did write a second novel and spent many sequential Sundays trying to find an agent. The novel worked its way up to the top of a few slush piles, and I got some nibbles here and there. But we were in the immediate aftermath of The Great Recession, and the publishing industry was experiencing a Great Reckoning, and I was a nobody with maybe a dozen fans.

Then I got pregnant and had a baby. I wouldn’t write again for 10 years.

//

I returned to my writing in 2020 because nothing else was going on that year. Ha, I jest. Everything was going on that year, which is why I took a day off work on my 40th birthday to attempt to process it all.

As a working mother during the pandemic who also lived in the Pacific Northwest with biracial children, I found myself at an unexpected epicenter of Black Lives Matter protests, caregiver burnout, and the literal burning of forests that generated smoke so thick, it broke the air quality index. “Whether it’s Covid, or wildfire smoke, or tear gas, or unrelenting stress, or a knee on the neck,” I wrote, “everywhere we are fighting to breathe.”

When I posted the story I’d written on Medium, Reaching Midlife During End Times: How 2020 Sunk and Saved Me, I forgot all about the compromise I’d reached with my husband over a decade ago. I published the story under my married name without giving it a second thought. By then, I’d become so used to my new name; my old name seemed like a relic from another era, back when I still played a leading role in my own life story.

The epitome of irony is that the story I posted directly addressed this very theme. In it, I said:

I was coming to terms with the fact that a Google search of my maiden name yielded far more impressive results than a search of my married name, and all the hard, hard work I had put in since having children was unseen and unappreciated by pretty much everybody, including major search engines.

Over the ensuing months, I proceeded to post more stories. It wasn’t until about a year in, when I finally felt I was starting to gain some traction, that I had a random Oh, shit! moment.

I realized I’d forgotten all about my pen name.

Now, while I’m by no means the “famous author” I dreamed of being as a child, I can confidently say I have more than a dozen readers (shoutout to my subscribers!), and changing my last name yet again seems like an onerous task. There’s the risk of confusion, though it’s somewhat tempered by my highly unusual first name (shoutout to my hippie parents!), and then of course, there’s all the goddamn bureaucracy. There are all the various corners of the Internet where my name might be hiding, all the checklist items to sift and sort through.

Ugh. Sometimes I even wonder if it’s worth it. What’s in a name, anyway? Juliet, of course, asked the same question, but she asked it because she was consumed by love for a man. I’m asking the question because I’m over loving a man, and I’m over all the things society asks women to do in the name of loving men.

//

I briefly toyed with the idea of taking on a new last name completely, something that has special significance to me. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to honor my first family, but I was tired of the tradition of honoring just one half of it. I thought about my mother’s original last name, but of course, that isn’t really “her” name, it’s her father’s, just as my grandmother’s name is her father’s, and my great grandmother’s name is her father’s, and on and on we go.

Then I started thinking about last names that paired well with my first name, preferably words related to nature, since immersing myself in nature has helped get me through these last turbulent years. I even surveyed Substack readers and settled on “Pine.” Kerala Pine. Pines are ubiquitous in the Pacific Northwest, and there are few places on Earth I feel happier than a sun-dappled path through a forest of towering pines.

I got pretty excited about Pine, but my first family was less than enthused. They thought it was weird, and a bit of a slap in the face.

I still don’t know what the “right” answer is. Everything seems problematic. If a couple coins an entirely new last name, they symbolically cut their ties to their larger networks of kin. If one half of a couple changes their last name, they risk erasing their own kin. If a couple joins their last names with a hyphen, they end up posing logistical challenges for subsequent generations.

Ultimately, I’m choosing to return to my original name because for one, I learned that I could take care of the legal name change in my final divorce papers. An entirely new last name would have required a separate legal process. (Of course, no one asked me if I’d like to legally change my children’s last names, even though I carried, birthed, and breastfed them and have spent 350 of the last 365 days single parenting them. But if I decide I want to fight this fight, I’ll leave it for another time. The ink on my divorce papers has just dried, and I’m tired of fighting.)

Perhaps most importantly, my original last name is Goodkin, and it seems like such a fitting one. My kin are indeed quite good. My immediate kin, my extended kin, and my chosen kin. Sure, I wish most of them lived closer to me, and I wish we were all more interdependent, and yes, some of them sometimes drive me nuts. But I’m lucky to have the network of kin that I do, and I’m happy to honor them. The next chapter of my life will be all about building and strengthening extended networks of good kin.

I know this story didn’t start out as a letter, but I’m going to end it as one, just for the chance to practice my new (old) signature. Who knows, maybe one of these days I’ll be using it to sign my divorce memoir. I’m reclaiming my identity, after all. Maybe it’s not too late to reclaim my childhood dreams.

Gratefully yours,