I kept my married name when I divorced. My children did not.
When I got divorced, I didn't change my last name to my maiden name.
I felt like our common last name connected me to our children.
Some of my children decided to change their names to my maiden name.
One of the first questions my divorce attorney asked when she began compiling the paperwork for court was, "Do you want to revert to your maiden name?" I said no for only one reason: I wanted to have the same last name as my children.
We had been married for 24 years and had five children. We'd chosen names for them that had deep personal meaning and merged my Jewish heritage with their father's Cambodian culture.
Our common last name united me with my children in a way our DNA could not.
Sharing a last name tells the world you're connected. As the mother of bi-racial children, it wasn't always obvious that I was their mom, yet my identity has always rested in that role as their primary parent.
Maybe it's my own judgmental nature that led to the decision not to change my name. I am prone to concoct all kinds of fantastical stories about why a woman may have a different last name from her child. I'm usually wrong.
We raised our children in a small town where gossip was rife. As a divorced woman, I'd felt held to a certain level of scrutiny. I didn't want to go to court anymore. It felt safer to hold on to my married name. Not everyone had to know my marriage had fallen apart. My children made a different choice.
On a visit home from college, my oldest son told me he'd decided to use Solomon as his last name. Although he did not change it legally — an unwieldy process that is only getting more complicated — he Americanized his Cambodian nickname, dropped his last name, and added my maiden name.
When his dad left home, he was 16, but it wasn't until he moved across the country to attend college in California that he took on the new identity. As an aspiring filmmaker, he believed his new name might open more doors for him.
My daughter also changed her name when she started college. She created a new first name from an acronym of her initials and swapped Yem for Solomon. I didn't know it until I visited her on campus and was greeted by her roommate with a "nice to meet you, Mrs. Solomon."
These two siblings made their name changes independently and without consulting each other. It ended up being more of a coincidence than anything else, but not all my children swapped names. The two boys in the middle are still Yems. One has Solomon as a middle name and probably did not see the need to make any changes. He did pass it down to his son as a middle name, perhaps starting a family tradition.
My daughter-in-law kept her maiden name when she married him. She feels very attached to it both personally and professionally, but she has no interest in adding hers to her children's names as a hyphenate or otherwise.
My youngest son is the only other one who's married. Before their ceremony, his wife wanted them both to use Solomon as a last name. They considered it but came up against the roadblocks of a legal name change. There are forms to fill out and hefty fees to pay.
In California, an announcement must appear as a legal notice in the local newspaper for a month, incurring another sizable fee. Then two to three months down the road, you appear before a judge who makes a final ruling and issues a court order with a new legal name. After that, your Social Security number, driver's license, passport, and other documents must all be updated. It was exhausting for them to contemplate while planning a wedding.
They ultimately decided they would hyphenate their last names, each adding the other's as a symbol of their love and commitment.
I never stopped to consider why my children made name changes. I felt deeply honored by what I perceived as an act of love and support for me. It didn't occur to me that there might be a deeper meaning behind their decisions.
Back then, I was so consumed with my own grief at the dissolution of my marriage, I didn't realize my children might be feeling the same sense of abandonment I was experiencing. As I reflect on their decisions now, I realize they each made profound pronouncements about the impact of the divorce on their lives, along with their fidelity to me.
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