Why We Gave Our Son His Mama’s Last Name

Editor’s Note: This piece is a collaboration between Misty McLaughlin and Michel Erard, a husband and wife who have a young son together. They have each authored a section, denoted by the name that appears above the text.

Misty:

Our son, who I’ll call V here, has my last name. Not a hyphenated name, nor a combo suffix. Not a combined, single surname. Not even a made-up last name that both of his parents share.

Instead, my husband and I opted to give him my name, a practice we call matronymy.

The story of naming V actually starts with how we both kept our own names five years ago, when Michael and I decided to pursue some community recognition of our relationship by getting married.

We considered the various routes for rebranding ourselves. What about making a new surname for our family, or taking something old? We contemplated new, “from scratch” names we might want to claim, trying to tie them to some essential selfness or legacy that we’d want to confer (on ourselves, and on any new family members that might come along). Nothing really fit us both – not our mothers’ maiden names, not the street we lived on, not our favorite variety of apple.

Looking back, the Women’s Studies major in me wants to believe that I always knew I’d keep my name. Doing so became for me an important defiance of the tradition of coverture (whereby married women becoming their husbands’ property). But it also constituted an act of identity and legacy. My father is the only male in his generation, and I am one of three sisters in a generation of five female grandchildren. We all bear our fathers’ last names. Keeping my name became a way to assert something about where I come from and the kind of woman I see myself as – someone both proud of her origins and also progressive.

Ultimately, both Michael and I made the same decision to keep our names as they’d always been. In practical terms, we’d both established professional identities that would have been compromised by any name change. (Some geekery: We used to joke that we couldn’t change our names because we’d have to buy new URLs.)

Our wedding ceremony emphasized this message: “We are a household, a unit, a family. We’re two people joining forces. But we’re not pretending to become one person. We will always be two, together.”

But then you bring a new person into the world, and you have the chance to start fresh with a name. This is a part of the story I’ll let my husband Michael tell.

Michael:

As the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, until the very moment that the ultrasound wand touched Misty’s pregnant belly, I wanted a daughter. Even after the tech delivered the news of his sex, I wanted a daughter.

A girl, an eldest girl, would introduce unfamiliar scenarios. I’d have to learn new tricks, be on my toes, and not deliver what had been delivered on me. More than anything, I wanted to break the back of the cycle of conflict between fathers and sons. Her birthright would be something different, something new, the best of me, the best of her. Maybe also our worst, but a different worst. Our worst.

But the ultrasound didn’t lie. It’s a boy! Ah, it’s a boy. Over the following weeks, Misty and I talked about numerous things, including names, and ultimately I allowed that if the boy had a different name, a different last name, I might be able to see him not as the oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son of an oldest son, but as a boy, someone related to me, but not an extension of me. If I’m a hammer, then perhaps disguising him as something other than a nail might protect him.

In Taiwan, where I lived after college, I remembered that people sometimes named their children “Little Pig” or “Little Chicken” in order to keep evil spirits away. There’s no child here. Just a barnyard animal. Giving him another last name might work the same way. But which other last name?

My wife is from a long line of people from the same place, and she possesses deep connections and an attachment to the past, with all its fraughtness and bygone glories. I really began to fall for her when she walked me around her small Texas hometown, pointing out this and that landmark, to which her family was connected. You already can suspect why this was so attractive: I’m from nowhere and have none of these geographical or cultural pieties. I’m tribeless. Pure American. Contrary to my wife, my plan of action and thought has always been to move forward in time; my worldview leans toward the horizon. Neither my mother nor father’s family has ever had any longing for a quaint village anywhere, perhaps because the quaint villages’ fields had potatoes turned to mush when my forebears abandoned them.

Once, when I was traveling to Ireland, my mother asked if I wanted to know where to find some relatives. I said no. Who are they to me? They’d mean as much as any other random Irish person.

So let’s give the baby his mother’s name, we decided, and that’s what we did, after polling a few friends about the optics of the situation, and running it up the family flagpole.

So far, so good. We’re only two years in, so I hesitate to hurrah that disguising him from my hammerness has worked. I may be less of a hammer than I feared and am trying to become a more flexible tool so that when the time really comes, it won’t matter what name he has.

And in general, our decision continues to make perfect sense. I’m writing this after attending a funeral and a burial in a churchyard where the group of headstones all carrying the last name went back decades, so that did give me pause, but only because that family’s deep connections to the history of a place impresses me so.

V and Misty’s family name has one other asset: it’s easy to say. I figure, I may have given my son a leg up by freeing him from this phonetic burden of a last name. After the ceremony, an old acquaintance was introducing me to his wife. “This is Mike Gerard…,” he said. I didn’t correct him and say, “actually, it’s Erard,” but it took a second to decide not to. At least V will never have to endure any of that.

One more thing: I love that he’s a boy.

Misty:

In our baby-naming process, we drew inspiration from a couple that decided – pre-ultrasound – that girls would take the mother’s last name, and boys would bear the father’s. (They had two boys, and ended up with the same surname configuration as most families in the U.S.) So pre-ultrasound, we entertained the inverse set-up: What if boys carried my name, and girls had Michael’s?

Since we wanted to give our child something from each of us, we decided on “Michael” as a middle name. This both broke the oldest-son surname successorship and also gave us a way to claim Michael’s legacy, roots, and paternity. Two of V’s names – his first name and another middle name in honor of his birthplace – are all his own. Though a surname is a particular cultural prize, naming him has showed me that there are plenty of other ways to make a name mean something, and plenty of things for a name to mean.

It’s still too early to tell how the matronymy will play out socially. Most responses have been overwhelmingly positive, but we didn’t do it to win bona fides. I can also anticipate where problems might arise, based on stories from other parents who’ve bestowed non-traditional names. School pickups. Medical forms. Birthday cards (many of which came addressed last year to “V Erard”).

I’ve also found myself more sensitive than I thought I be would to implied judgments about paternity. When giving V’s name, I often anticipate the question, “is he Michael’s biological son?” though no one has actually ever asked me this. Yet I expect that they’re wondering to themselves and so I find myself preemptively explaining, “V is OUR son, but he has MY name.” Maybe rehearsing this will be useful for the future.

What’s in a name? Our experience with V’s names – all four of them – has shown me that naming is, of course, an inherently political act. It’s also among the most intimate and powerful acts one person can do to another. Names are claim-stakers, legacy-imparters, future-shapers. They’re signposts of identity, and invitations too. Someone said that they’re “linguistic umbilical cords.”

Recently, V has started to pick up on his plethora of names. Most of the time, he refers to himself by his first name. Sometimes he’ll append the “Michael” if he’s feeling especially close to his papa. And when he’s done something he’s not proud of, he’ll refer to himself by his other middle name – a kind of nom de crime. He’s still learning to pronounce the “McLaughlin.” At two, he’s already shaping his identity, experimenting with different versions of himself. I’m happy to have given him a variety to choose from – knowing that he’ll become all these names, and more.

Misty McLaughlin is a parent by vocation, a nonprofit web consultant by trade, and a writer and seamstress by fits and starts. Among other topics, she’s passionate about exploring issues of gender and generation, helping other households to find cultural loopholes that allow them to make their own models, and promoting institutional support for rebooting our roles. Follower her on Twitter @mistymclaughlin.

Michael Erard is a linguist and author of Babel No More: The Search for the World’s Most Extraordinary Language Learners, which will be published in 2012 by Free Press/Simon & Schuster. He’s written about language for the New York Times, Science, Wired, the New Scientist, and many other publications, and is a contributing writer to Design Observer.

Photo credit Artful Magpie/Flickr

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