What’s in a name?
My name is Susan Elizabeth Hughes, but I go by Suzy.
Growing up I found that some people liked to use nicknames, regardless of my liking of the nickname.
My math teachers always called me “Sue” for some reason–concise, I guess. My friends would come up with nicknames, like Suzy Q (obvious), SQ, Suez, and lastly, “Suey” — like a pig-call–if they wanted to be a little mean (my older siblings were especially fond of this one).
The night I arrived at Lackland Air Force Base for basic training, the first stop was the bathroom for those who needed it. Those who didn’t stood silently rank and file, exhausted from travel and stunned by the reality of the decision they had made to volunteer to serve this country. As I stood there with the other recruits, mostly of us still in our teenage years, Airmen moved through the lines as sort of guards to keep an eye on us until the Training Instructors returned to move us to the next stop.
“Don’t volunteer for anything, don’t let them know your name.”
They whispered these ominous instructions as tips on how we could make it through the next six weeks by remaining anonymous. Ironic advice, since we had already asserted our individuality and autonomy by signing our names to the most serious commitment of our young lives.
Years later, as a new nurse, I vividly remember the first time a doctor called me by my first name. I had been on the job for months, and until that moment I didn’t have any indication that the doctors saw me enough as an individual to differentiate me from the other 12 new nurses I started with.
As an adult, my close friends and family call me “Suz”. My ex-husband still refers to me as “Suz” during the sessions with our parent mediator.
I should have had it written into our settlement that he may no longer call me that.
One name that I never took for myself is the last name of my ex. That never stopped people from putting that on me, though. From the time I got married and had kids people felt free to try to erase me from my own name. I was “Mrs. Ex’s-Last-Name” or “Child’s Mom”. I rarely corrected people. I understood the why behind their mistake and decided not to make a big deal over it; however, I always understood that in society that default reflected the understanding that a woman’s place was only as a satellite to the other person.
I recently remembered an encounter I had with a new dad early in my career as a labor and delivery nurse. He was in the intensive care nursery watching over his new baby. I left his wife to get his signature on something, and I had to get his attention. I made the mistake of assuming he and his wife shared the same last name, so I called him “Mr. Insert-Wife’s-Last-Name-Here”. Instead of doing what millions of women who choose not to change their name in marriage do every day and let the honest mistake go without comment, this man railed at me. “Is this going to be a problem?” he screamed. “That is NOT my last name, nor will it be my child’s last name! Who do I have to talk to?”
His rage that his identity wasn’t known in this place, and that his child should be known by his name and not his wife’s, revealed his indifference to the the fact that it was through his wife’s body that the baby came into being; that his wife’s body was the one forever changed by the miracle; that his wife’s body was the one redesigned for the role of mothering via pregnancy and lactation hormones and would continue to nourish and nurture the child well past the severing of the full life support she had provided until the moment of birth.
Throughout history women have been expected to dissolve themselves once they start a family of their own. Nothing is more telling about that expectation than our traditions surrounding names.
So what are we supposed to do when our husbands lack the capacity to grow up, so leave us, and our children do grow up and leave us, too? How are we to find ourselves again?
I guess we can start with our name.
