Losing the Last Name

January 14th, 2012, posted by Aimee

Well, it’s official. Just under eight years after saying “I do” on a beach in Mexico, I have finally gotten around to filing all the paperwork to take my husband’s last name. The social security card arrived today, the new drivers license is on its way, and I am still struggling to get into the rhythm with a new signature.

“It’s about time!” my mother, many of my friends, and even the woman at the DMV have been crowing and I have to admit they are probably right that it might have been much easier to do this right when we filed for our marriage license than all the tedious back-tracking involved now.

So, what took me so long anyway? Or why did I even decide to bother after eight years of married bliss as Aimee Grove? The first question is easier to answer than the second, I guess. The bottom line is that I just never understood what the fuss was about taking Nate’s last name in the first place. After all, hadn’t I been a Grove for 28 years before we ever met? Hadn’t I spent a dozen years building a career with bylines under my maiden name? Why would I want to ditch a perfectly functional and slightly well known moniker just to follow an archaic and somewhat sexist tradition? Later, the inconvenience factor seemed to seal the issue. What a pain in the butt to change the name on every single legal document, bank and credit account, even the title on our home was my reasoning.

So, what changed? Well, Tav happened for one thing. At first, having a different last name than my kid didn’t seem like such a big deal, particularly when we were living in San Francisco, where this is more the norm than the exception. But then once Tav was in school and we were more in the routine of interacting with strange parents, teachers and administrators, the continual clarification of my status started to wear thin. After a while I would sometimes just go with “Aimee Wells” for the convenience and then forget and introduce myself as Grove again, only to be met with quizzical looks.

In the end, I finally decided to bite the bullet this fall. Kindergarten for Tavish is right around the corner, I finally had a teeny bit of time to take care of personal matters, and I found an annoyingly named web site – MissNowMrs.com – that could walk me through the process. I decided once and for all, I wanted to share a name with husband AND my son … and now I am. Damn if I haven’t truly morphed into a suburbanite out here. Oh well, I think “Aimee Wells” sounds pretty cute anyway, though.

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