
Remember the first time you liked a boy in school?
You probably still slept with stuffed animals, and looked forward to the day you’d have to start wearing a bra with equal parts dread and excitement. Also, you probably carried around sparkly notebooks covered with scratch-and-sniff stickers, in which you wrote your first name together with your crush’s last name, and the names of your future children. Come on – we all did it.
The funny thing is, while most of us stopped sleeping with stuffed unicorns and got accustomed to wearing bras, a lot of us actually did grow up and change our names to the names of the boys we liked. Weird, right?
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Don’t get me wrong – I did it too. Of course, I was only 25 when I got married; too young to know very much. I didn’t know, for example, that my father would die just seven years after my wedding, leaving me longing to reclaim the name we’d shared. And too, I didn’t know I’d get divorced just a few years after that – or how much of a pain in the ass it would be to legally change my name back to the one I’d been born with. I’m pretty sure the hall outside the Social Security office in downtown Brooklyn still has a mark from where I kicked it in frustration after a clerk told me I didn’t have the correct documentation to prove I was divorced. (Shoutout to Frye engineer boots: they can do some serious damage.)