'Tradition wasn’t a good enough reason to convince me that the children I grew in my own body shouldn’t have my name'
, a short-story collection. Her stories, essays and comics have appeared in Vox, the New York Times, the Nib and elsewherehe woman from the Social Security office had a lot of questions. I dutifully answered them, using my shoulder to clamp the big hospital phone to my ear so I could use both hands to adjust my one-day-old son’s latch. She asked me my name, birthdate, place of birth, marital status, Social Security number. Then she asked me all of these same questions about my husband.
This is the assumption I’ve been pushing back against since my first son was born nine years ago: that babies must take their fathers’ last name. It’s true that patrilineal baby-naming dominates in America. Researchers have found that heterosexual married couples give the baby. But tradition wasn’t a good enough reason to convince me that the children I grew in my own body shouldn’t have my name. After all, it’s women who do the hard work of pregnancy and childbirth.
This didn’t feel like history to me. It felt like who I was, who I am, and an important part of what I wanted to pass on to my children, and their children, and so on. I grew up in a family with three daughters, so if the name was going to survive another generation, one of us girls would have to buck tradition. I wanted it to be me.
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