WoMo Word #97: Invisi-Mrs.
September 2nd, 2010, posted by Aimee
Invisi-Mrs.: woman who sends out emails using her husband’s account, possibly because she doesn’t have her own email account (or computer or smartphone).
It was one of those emails in my inbox that I would ordinarily delete without opening. After all, I don’t know anyone named “John Stanke,” and doesn’t my IT guy regularly warn us against clicking on unknown messages? If it weren’t for the subject line “Playdate for CPP,” that sucker would’ve been history. But CPP is the shortened name of my son’s preschool, and so the email – inviting us to a Friday afternoon park playdate – was spared. Turns out, the email was signed “Sherry Stanke,” obviously the spouse of said John Stanke.
Not sure why it irked me, but it did, the fact that Sherry was sending out notes from her hubby’s account. But I wondered, in this era of iPhones and crackberries, Droid phones and everything in between, not to mention free Web-based email services from Google and Yahoo, how is it even possible that an adult woman might not have an email address of her own? Does she have to ask her husband permission to use the computer at all? Is she invisible now that she’s married? Thus was born, “Invisi-Mrs.” – someone whose identity is completely absorbed and subsumed by her role as mother and wife.
The whole thing reminded me a bit of the perspective I had prior to getting married about taking a husband’s last name. These days, mainly because I have been too damn busy to get down to the DMV and other government offices to officially switch “Grove” to “Wells,” I encounter the numerous hassles of having a different last name than your child when dealing with doctors and schools and playdates. But aside from this, I still sometimes question the idea of literally losing a piece of my own identity – the name I have worn for more than 40 years – to my husband’s. More than two decades of a career in which my byline has appeared over hundreds of articles and a LinkedIn/Google presence all chronicled under my maiden name … how do you toss that aside so easily? How could others do it so easily? (Okay, if your name was hard to spell or embarrassing, I could understand a little better …).
Comments
Being a blawger is like being in charge of your own personal insane asylum.