What’s in a name?

When I got married, I spent an intensely serious couple of days contemplating whether to take my husband’s last name or not. This was resolved, as many of my moral dilemmas are, by a blinding epiphany that turns out to be obvious and maybe not even relevant later on. I realized I might as well take my husband’s name rather than keeping my father’s name, because, while both are patriarchal labels, at least my husband’s was one I chose for myself.

When we were leaving Cairo in 2004, we (see, I should just say I, because I know that Dick, if he were to write about this, would probably say I, but why should I change my natural inclusive inclination just to chafe against the traditional marriage identity? I’m sure others have noticed that women say “we” more often than men when talking about mutual memories. But why should I even care? This is just a semantic argument.)

In any case, I, yes I, thought we should have a permanent family email address that we could give out to people so that old friends would always be able to reach us. I selected j_tom_shannon@hotmail.com. I wrote Dick’s name first because it was shorter; it fits my sense of order to have the single letter, then the 3 letters, then the 7 letters.

A few months later, Dick wrote an update about our family to some friend or family member, and at the end he wrote our email addresses as “Jane’s: j_tom_shannon@hotmail.com, Dick’s: thj@tampabay.rr.com.” Hah! I thought this story wasn’t so important, but now I even remember that he was writing the update to a group of Writing Fellows at BYU, which was where we met and fell in love amid our academic peers.

So yes, 6 years on (at the time), we were happily settled, and yes, thank you, Jane had completely lost her identity in the marriage/family relationship. It wasn’t that Dick had created his own rr.com email address–I had one too “soj@tampabay.rr.com.” It was that he would tell our former academic peers that my address was the family’s address. I was mortified (and madder still when Dick couldn’t understand why. Men are clueless).

I should have sent my own update, but they probably weren’t even interested in the first one, and far be it from me to push myself forward.

My friend Tara complained to me the other day that her husband hadn’t posted to their family blog in a while (ever?). It was funny, because I had been thinking that I would like to change our blog to “Jane’s Family” or “Jane’s Page,” and to be the only post-er.

Virginia knew what she was talking about, even for those of us less talented or less ambitious or less something (feel my shame). I need a blog of my own. The problem is, most of me is this “Johnson Family.”