What's In A Name?

At some point in my early thirties (not until my early thirties!) I realized that if I got married, whether I adopted my spouse's name or not - I would never really have my own name. 

I  have a strong connection to my heritage as the descendent of people who were enslaved in this country. My people are the women and men who found their ways out of oppression through sharecropping, domestic work, and migrating to a better life in the West. My people are the men and women who created unprecedented opportunities for their children and carved out a black middle class in Bakersfield, California, where there was none before. I’m tied to them through the stories that circulate in my family and the old photographs that surface from time to time, and the facial features I can recognize across the generations. 

The connection is not in the name. 

My last name, Williams, belonged to my father, and my grandfather, and my great grandfather - a man I’ve never known, and a man my great grandmother did not choose to marry or raise her child with.  Not too long before that, the name belonged to a slave owner (indubitably a man) somewhere in Georgia. Most likely. The particulars are vague because the records only go back so far. 

So even if I "kept" my maiden name throughout my life, was it really mine to begin with?

When I met a man that I wanted to spend the rest of my life with, and we got engaged, this philosophical and largely theoretical question about last names came sharply into focus. For me.

Whenever I told a woman that I was getting married, pretty quickly the question of whether or not I would change my name came up. This question was never posed to my fiancé about his name. Except when I asked him.

"So...what are you going to do about your name?" friends, acquaintances, the grocery store clerk would inquire. At first I thought I would stay a Williams. That alone felt like a small victory of some kind (in the ongoing saga of Malika vs. the Patriarchy). It felt like a modern choice. Independent woman. Assured. But it also lacked something.

I can't ignore the fact that I want to be an exclusive member of my own family name club. I want monogramed stuff. Probably not towels, but maybe a sign on the mailbox? I want to be known as a collective. I want to share a last name with the person of my choosing.

So my thinking evolved. Maybe we could both be Williams-Anderson, or Anderson-Williams? I could compromise on the order.

I brought the idea to my partner. He was skeptical. "Anderson-Williams is a lot of letters..." I didn't disagree. He said he was happy for me to stay Williams and he would remain Anderson. He said he liked his name, especially the way it anagrams to “A Random Nerd Wanders On."

It's worth mentioning that my beloved has the exact same name as his late father. He's not just an Anderson, he's an Anderson II. Bearing his father's name has an emotional significance that he didn't necessarily want to detach from.

The simplest way forward was clear: we could both keep our established names and leave it at that.

But what about the monogrammed goods? And children?

"So, our kids would be Williams-Andersons, right?" I posed...a little desperately.

I couldn't imagine being outnumbered by Andersons in my own home. No way. If there was going to be a family name club under my roof, I would have to be a founding, named, member.

My fiance grimaced and raised the Too Many Letters Issue again. He believed that having a cumbersome last name could cause a lifetime of irksomeness for our future critters (as we fondly refer to the yet-to-exist children). 

I rolled my eyes. It works for Brad and Angelina's children! They'll be fine! 

He pushed back - and where would it end? If the critter had a hyphenated name, and they married someone else with a hyphenated name - would the grandkids be double hyphenates? The Anderson-Williams-Jolie-Pitts?

Honestly, I couldn't care less about the grandkids' last names. They'll have to cross that bridge when they get to it. But this was definitely a sticking point for my future husband.

"Well, we could make up our own name." I tossed into the conversation casually, half-heartedly. His eyebrows went up and his head tilted to the side. "Hmmm...maybe so..." he mused.

Then, we didn't discuss it again for 3 months.

People continued to ask me what I was going to do and I'd give a short recap - "basically - I said that either we both change our names or neither of us do, but I want the kids to have my name too, but Norm doesn't want their last names to be too long, which I don't think is really a thing, but maybe we'll come up with a new name? But we haven't talked about it in a while, so probably we'll just keep our own names..."

The inertia of making no decision was building momentum. I knew that if I wanted us to come to a resolution, it was on me to bring it up again before the wedding. Or, we could table the issue all together until the first critter arrived.

It's not really my style to table anything though. So, we hashed it out again. In many ways, my partner had more at stake in the arrangement. My family expected that I might adopt a new name at some point in my life, but Norm's change would come as much more of a surprise. Fortunately, my partner likes to be surprising.

Another tidbit that informs this conversation is the fact that as a couple, Norm and I both love naming things. We have our own language - that we use daily- with dozens? hundreds? of words and phrases made up and strung together from our experiences together. We enjoy words, we delight in whimsy, and we're excellent (in our own estimation) at finding the right combination of syllables and sounds to convey a concept.

Based on both of our concerns, values, and a little bit of research, a new reality emerged. The clearest choice was to make our own name together.

And so we did.

There was a voracious period of brainstorming. Anything was fair game to consider. Anything was fair game to veto. Tilapia? Nope. Wilder? A combination of our existing names. Interesting, but Norm knew someone with that last name from a previous job...so no.

Ultimately, we settled on a word that has a deeper significance and represents something we want to be known for - in the way we relate to one another, and in the way we relate to the world at large.

Amandi.

The word is latin, and is a gerund of the verb "to love."

There is still work to be done to fully become Amandis. The decision to change our name is not without a significant investment of money and time (to navigate the bureaucratic maze of legal documentation) for me and my partner. But we wholeheartedly believe that it's worth it.

At the beginning of this journey I feared I would have to give part of myself up, or quiet my instincts about what I desire for my family. That couldn't be further from my experience. Now, I am more clear about who I am and the future I am creating as a married person in an equal partnership. And remarkably, as Malika Amandi, I have become more myself than I've ever been.  

with love and respect,

Malika

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