On Changing One's Name

I’m a Jennifer.  The natural assumption is that I am – like so many of my generation – named after the heroine of the popular tear-jerker, Love Story.  I am not; my namesake was just some kid my mom student-taught.  We have a Polaroid of her floating around somewhere.  In it, a seven year-old in a red minidress shields her eyes from the sun’s glare as she smiles for the camera, a hand on her hip validating the sassy personality to which my mother took a shine more than 40 years ago.  I often put my hands on my hips while I make sassy remarks.  I’d like to think this is not pure coincidence.

Because my name was #1 on the baby name popularity list up until the mid-Eighties, in school it wasn’t out of the realm of likelihood that I’d sit in a class with four or five other Jennifers.  Indeed from high school through college at least half of my social group shared the same forename.  Jenny, Jennie, Jen, Jenn:  with or without one’s last initial attached, there are only so many iterations of Jennifer to go around.  So we ended up calling each other by our last name; it was just easier for us to keep track of each other.

What Jennifer lacks in distinctiveness my maiden name makes up in spades.  I’m a Blessman:  German in origin and few in number.  When I was a kid I didn’t like it, since the “bless” part made me an easy target for schoolyard taunting.  Fortunately, you hear one Blessman joke you’ve heard them all.  The teasing pretty much dissipated by second grade, but over the years other torments settled in its place, often in the form of epic misspellings.  Despite my frustrations, over the years I gradually got used to and eventually grew to love my last name, kind of like an arranged marriage.

And now I’m letting it go.  I got married at the end of March, and currently I’m in the process of changing my name.  It wasn’t a decision I got talked into or that I struggled with at all.  Nor was it a political statement or an indication that I’m not a liberated female.  Call me old school if you want, I’m an old school kind of girl.  It came down to simply this:  I waited almost 40 years to find the love of my life – I’ll be damned if I’m not taking his last name.

I went about the process very methodically: SSN, passport, driver’s license, bank.  So far, the change has been as surprisingly swift as it has been easy.  What I wasn’t counting on was how, well, weird it is to see my new name in print, on an official document recognized by the US Department of State, no less.  It’s even more jarring when it comes time to sign my autograph.  The flow I’ve perfected between first and last names comes to a screeching halt mid-signature.  I am once again a grade-schooler, learning to sign my name carefully in cursive.

I’ve done the legwork without incident; now every time I take my new name out for a spin my confidence plummets and I start to second guess my decision.  Have I been too hasty?  Can I stop the process?  How can I possibly give up my last name?  Blessman is my identity!  Then I remember that the trepidation bubbling up is from the same person who wrote a blog under an alias, the blog her future husband read for months before contacting its author to go on a date.  Identity is identity – it has little if anything to do with a birth name.

So I remind myself that it’s time to move on.  As I sad as I am to leave Blessman behind, my melancholy is a little tempered by knowing that a new Blessman is in the world: my 7-month old niece Lila.  Now she gets to struggle with the teasing and the misspelling and the random folks lighting up at the fortune of this child having such a blessed name.  Now she gets to hate it, be baffled by it, intrigued by it and eventually fall in love with it, just like I did.

At our wedding, my maid of honor’s speech centered around an episode from our first week in college, wherein I lined up all the Jennifers on our floor and established nicknames for each.  I ended with me, suggesting that everyone “Just call me Blessman.”  Jenna finished her by reminding everyone that now that I’ve joined my life with my husband Marcus, I’m henceforth a Tonti.

After dinner, my friend Kathryn pulled me aside and very earnestly asked whether our friends indeed had to refer to me now by my married name.

“Of course not,” I replied.  “I’ll always be Blessman.”