After my wife Jessica and I decided—around month six of her pregnancy—that we were going to hyphenate our daughter’s last name, I developed a few jokes to explain to friends, family and random people I met at parties why we were giving our soon-to-be-born daughter the behemoth last name “Grogan-Oppenheimer.”
I didn’t say, as some might, that it was a feminist-inspired decision. Nor did I just say the name, confidently, without any need to explain or apologize for it. Instead I said something like this:
We’re both too selfish to leave our last names off of her.
Or something like this:
She’ll have to be very impressive to carry off a name like that.
Or just this:
Everyone has a cross to bear.
The truth, as you may have already guessed, is that I was pretty embarrassed by the situation. We were both too selfish to give up our name. And it will be a cross to bear. And someday, when she’s about to have a child of her own, we can be pretty sure that the kid will get her partner’s name because Grogan-Oppenheimer is just too behemoth of a name to survive past one generation.
Also, it’s not a very attractive name (not that Grogan or Oppenheimer are the most euphonious names in the world, but at least they have a kind of integrity).
All of this we knew when we decided to hyphenate, but it’s one thing to make such a decision in the abstract, before the kid is born, and it’s another, as we’re rapidly discovering, to live with such a name. It sucks to spell it out on the phone to various bureaucrats, always feeling obligated to preface it with “this is a long one.” It sucks to cram it into the space on various forms which was created to allow for your typical 11-letter long name—Oppenheimer, say—but not for a 17-letter (18-character) name.
Maybe the worst thing is just looking at our beautiful daughter’s first and middle names, Jolie Marybeth, which are distinct and lovely and in memory of our friend Marybeth, and seeing how the last name overwhelms them.
So we’re thinking that we’re going to change it. One of the names is going to have to go. But which one? We still have all the same old problems. I don’t want to have an Irish daughter, and Jess doesn’t want to have a Jewish daughter. We’re both writers: We care about words, and names, and we feel as if our names our a part of who we are and who we want our daughter to be (it means something to be an Oppenheimer, and to be a Grogan).
Jess wants to have a Grogan-child because she wants to honor the memory of her father, who died a few years ago, and because if she doesn’t, then her branch of the Grogan family tree ends with her (whereas I have two brothers, not to mention cousins galore, to be fruitful and multiply the Oppenheimer name). She has no siblings, and her aunt’s kids have their father’s name.
I want to have an Oppenheimer-child because ? well, because I want to. Because I love the name, and because I fear it would feel emasculating to have kids who don’t have my last name, and yes, yes, I know that a real man, who’s secure in his masculinity, would be comfortable letting his kids have his wife’s name, but in the real world, the one in which I’m not so secure about my masculinity, in which I’m married to a real, very forceful, moderately controlling woman, it’s not so simple.
My kids, I’m quite sure, are never going to feel that their mother has subordinated who she is—what she wants, how she exists in the world—to be their mother and my wife. They may, however, wonder about their father. They may connect his more passive role as a husband and father to the fact that they, unlike most of their friends and almost everyone they know, have their mother’s last name.
I don’t know. I hope Jess and I get to the point in our marriage where I’m not so often feeling like the subordinate partner. I hope, if the kids take the Grogan name, that they’re proud of their father for being a good feminist, a real man. But I worry.
So that’s where we are. We’re pretty sure that we’re going to change Jolie’s name, we’re secretly suspecting that we’ll lose the Oppenheimer, and we’re trying to figure out a way to do it all that makes us happy and loving rather than bitter and resentful.
