Namely Marly

About a year ago I started an experiment. I began writing with my left hand. I started this on a Friday morning on another one of our long treks to North Dakota. When you have a 13-hour drive ahead of you, it’s no telling what you’ll do to entertain yourself! You can see the results in this picture; it was not so great. In fact, I think most 4-year olds have better penmanship regardless of the hand they’re using. However, I loved it so much that I kept doing it. When you’ve been writing with your right hand most of your life, it’s not easy to switch to your left hand: you have to draw the letters backwards. Numbers seemed nearly impossible. It was all a struggle, but I have kept at it.

You may ask why I’m doing this. I mean, left handed people have traditionally been the subject of bad social stigmas. The derivative of the words for right handed people have been associated with justice, authority, and dexterity. However, the root of the word for left handedness, sinestra, eventually took on the meaning of evil or unlucky. There are also negative colloquialisms associated with left handed people: for example, having two left feet. Interestingly enough, phrases similar to this one can be found in many languages. In Spanish there is a even a reference to doing something on the left that means doing it underhandedly. Even the term ambidextrous implies doing something right handed on both sides. Poor lefties – they get no respect.

With 93% of people showing right-handed tendencies, maybe I just wanted to see what it felt like to be left handed for awhile. But there were more reasons that caused me to begin using my left hand. A couple of years ago I broke my collar bone and couldn’t move my right arm much for about 6 weeks. I recall feeling baffled by how limited the dexterity was in my left hand. How could I be so strong on one side and so infantile on the other? I was also inspired by my husband who writes with his left-hand but plays tennis, baseball and eats right-handed. I think that level of ambidexterity is admirable! I wanted some of that. But there’s also the mental challenge of it. I’ve read that the brain needs to be “exercised” to learn new tasks – whether that’s learning another language, a new skill…or writing with your left hand.

In fact, Lawrence C. Katz, PhD and Manning Ruben promote neurobics, a system of brain exercises based on scientific research. Dr. Katz discusses the concept of switching the hand that you normally write with. “If you are right handed, controlling a pen is normally the responsibility of the cortex on the left side of the your brain. When you change to writing left handed, the large network of connections, circuits, and brain areas involved in writing with your left hand – which are normally rarely used – are now activated on the right side of your brain.”

Dr. Katz refers to this as neurobic exercise which he defines as including the following:

• Involve one or more of your senses in a novel context
• Engage your attention
• Break a routine activity in an unexpected, novel way

So in addition to to improving my dexterity, I’m also exercising my brain! In fact, I’ve heard some people suggest that people who are left-handed are smarter. I haven’t seen the evidence on this, but after a year of writing with my left hand, I would like to suggest a new theory. People who are left-handed are required to be more ambidextrous. Because the majority of people are right handed, left handed people are sometimes required to do some things with their right hand – using scissors, cameras, guitars, etc. I think being ambidextrous must better develop both sides of the brain.

I’m going to be writing more on the topic of left handedness in the future, but in the meantime, why not give your left hand a try at something? If you’re not ready to tackle writing, try brushing your teeth with your left hand or eating dinner. You’ll be surprised at how uncomfortable and taxing this can be. But remember, you’re giving your brain a workout so it is well worth the effort!

If you doubt the impact that changing a name can have on a life, consider Barack Obama. Yes, it’s true that his given name at birth was Barack. So how, you may ask, did he change his name?

When he was a child everyone referred to him as Barry, the same derivative of Barack that his father chose. The story goes that his father chose a nickname just as a lot of people from other countries do when trying to fit into this culture. It seemed only natural then, that Barack who was given the same name as his father, would use the same nickname.

It appears that Barack took comfort in the name Barry. A black boy growing up in Hawaii with a white mother and grandparents would want to fit in somehow. A Newsweek article on Barack’s name shows that when questioned about the nickname, he described, how “he didn’t want to have to explain his name. ‘Barry’ was just a way of simplifying things—a small compromise to smooth the way in society.”

He continued to go by Barry until his early twenties. In college his struggle transformed from trying to fit in to trying to find himself. Friends encouraged him to claim his heritage and go by Barack. I can imagine how that must have resonated with him.  How better to stake a claim for new territory than putting up a flag that labels who owns the property. A name is like the flag testifying who lives here; who owns this life!

You may still think that changing a name from a nickname to a birthname is not technically a name change. But I would argue that it requires the same steps. It requires courage to ask people to call you something different. It’s why there can be comfort in being around new people where you can call yourself what you want. It’s when you’re around people who have known you for years that it’s difficult. People don’t like change. They don’t like it for themselves and they don’t like it for those they love.

Asking people begin to call him Barack wasn’t always easy. Some members of his family insisted on calling him Barry. Through the years he must have won this battle. I think he is a better person for figuring out who he is and how he would be named. Larry Ackerman describes one problem with politics: the expectation to try to be someone you’re not. Maybe having gone through this this process of figuring out who he really is can help him be an authentic leader. I also think the name Barack suits him much better. We all would be better served for this opportunity. To be self reflective. To consider our identity. To choose how we will be named.

I have a little glass container at home that holds shards of broken bird eggs. Mostly robins’ eggs because that is what we have the most of in our neighborhood. My husband and I go out for daily walks with our dogs and on the glorious occasion when I see one of these partial treasures, I carefully cradle it on the walk home and add it to my collection.

To me that egg represents the birth of something new. The generative nature of life on this earth.

With life teeming all around us, it’s interesting how easy it is as humans to get stuck. We can get attached to things as simple as hairstyles. Or we can remain fastened to more complex things such as how we react to others.

I remember being invited to a bat mitzvah once. I had never been to one of these before, and I thought it was a wonderful recognition of this young woman’s transition from being a child to becoming an adult. What an incredible rite of passage and opportunity for celebration.

I think we pass through many rites of passages in our lives. Lewis Carroll reminds us of this—both whimsically and metaphorically—in his book, Alice in Wonderland. Here is one quote as an example:  “Who are You?” said the Caterpillar. “I…I hardly know, Sir, just at present,” Alice replied, rather shyly. “At least I know who I was when I got up this morning, but I think I must have changed several times since then.”

We have robins that lay eggs each spring in a nest outside our bedroom window. It is a family event to watch the robins preparing the nest, laying the eggs, and then caring for the young, tender brood up until and long after they’ve left the nest. The thing is, we need that when we’re emerging into a new world. We need to be nourished to build our strength to survive. It takes two robins working non-stop to get the baby robins to fledge and then to care and protect the younglings until they’re ready to be on their own.

Maybe this is why I keep that glass jar of shattered eggshells; symbolic remnants of birth. A reminder of rebirth and the need for self love and self nurturing to prepare for life’s next phase.

About 90% of women in the United States elect to change their last name when they get married. I have pondered recently what’s behind this unanimity in marital name changing in the United States.

In fact, I conducted my own survey and reached a similar conclusion. Over 90% of my survey respondents indicated they changed their name when they married. The majority of these women answered in a follow-up question that they were glad that they had made the change. So, case closed. Or is it?

In reading some of the comments posted to these questions, it doesn’t seem quite as easy to interpret. For example, some of the women who changed their name when marrying had this to say about it:

• I did not really want to do the traditional thing of changing my name; it seemed too patriarchal to me. Finally, I compromised and hyphenated my name. I hated it, really. I disliked it because it did not feel like me and because my name was so long and difficult, it just left people saying “what?”
• I actually would have preferred to have kept my maiden name when I married, but it was very important to my husband that I take his name. So I took his name as a gesture of love.
• I briefly considered keeping my name or hyphenating it, but…simplicity seemed best.
• I feel it reflects commitment in a marriage.
• I guess it’s more “my name” now.

Many women today may not realize that there was a time when women weren’t even allowed to keep their maiden name when they married. In fact, in the early 1800s a married woman wasn’t allowed to own anything. In a sense, a wife was basically owned by her husband. So maintaining her own name was not really much of an option.

Just as women suffragists fought for the right for women to vote, there have also been those who have fought for the rights of a woman to keep her last name after marrying. One of the first women in this country to keep her birth name was Lucy Stone. There is now a Lucy Stone League which advocates for equality in decisions about whether a woman changes her name or not.

Other examples of women who fought to keep their names include:

• In 1924, Dr. Marjorie Mason Jarvis sued to be able to maintain her birth name after marrying. She worked for the federal government (as a physician), and the policy was that all married women who were federal employees had to use their husbands’ last name for payroll purposes. She could have appealed the decision, but she left employment of the federal government.
• In 1945, Antonia Rago was told that she couldn’t vote unless she changed to her husband’s last name.  The state she lived in had a law requiring married women to use their husband’s name to vote. Many states had such laws or quickly adopted them to nip this issue in the bud. Rago lost her case, but others began to make a dent in public law. The cases illustrated that it was not law, but custom that dictated women changing their last names when marrying.
• Wendy Forbush, in 1972, could not obtain a driver’s license in her own name because of a state regulation that required a husband’s name. She lost this case and the reason cited was administrative convenience.

There are other cases that could be cited, but the point is this: the option of choosing your last name upon marriage is something that was fought for. These women were often ridiculed and ostracized for their choices. They often lost cases and frequently fought on through appeals with one thing in mind: that a woman should have a choice about whether or not to take on the name of her husband when marrying.

One woman in my survey said this about changing her name after getting married: “It felt like who I was was being swallowed up by who my husband was.” It’s understandable to feel that way since your name can be a big part of your identity.

Some women don’t like their birth name and are happy for an opportunity to change it. However, if you don’t fall into this category, know your options. Some of these include:

• Women can keep their birth name
• Men can take on the surname of their wife (I know examples where this has happened)
• One or both members of the couple can choose to hyphenate their two surnames
• The couple can create a new last name (possibly some combination of their surnames) that they both change to
• One or both members of the couple can have two last names (a combination of the two surnames)

I know it is a difficult decision to make because I’ve done it recently. When I married my husband two years ago, we struggled to decide what to do with our last names. Finally, I decided to add his last name, but with a space between the two last names. I felt in this way I could have the option of continuing to go by my birth name (which I love), while still being a part of his family (which I love as well).

There have been downsides to this decision. Right now it is almost impossible to do any type of online check-in for a flights. For some reason, the two last names throws the system for a loop. So although I took both last names, I wish I would have kept my driver’s license with one last name so things like this could be a little more convenient. It’s not as if online check-in has been around that long to spend too much time grieving its loss. In the long run, these types of snafus will resolve themselves, so I’m not too worried about it.

If you have different ideas on last names and marriage, please post your comments. I don’t really believe there are any wrong ways to do it, as long as you know what your choices are and what influences are present and impact your decision. What’s most important is to make the best decision that’s right for you.