I didn't want to drop my last name after getting married so I added my husband's to my name. Without a hyphen people didn't know what to call me.
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When my husband proposed, it wasn't a surprise. By the time I started wearing an engagement ring, we had already decided on what kind of wedding we wanted and where we would live.
However, nearly up until my wedding day, I couldn't decide whether I would change my last name. My husband was open that he wanted me to take his name of "Smith," but assumed that I would keep my maiden name after we said our vows. I wasn't so sure.
When we got married, I was 27. I had graduated from law school and started my career. I started building a reputation and spent hours networking with other attorneys. I was known by my maiden name professionally and didn't want to create any confusion that could derail my career track over a case of mistaken identity. Additionally, I had only had one name my entire life. My name was the thing in life I used the most, and it seemed odd to change it just because I was getting married.
And yet, I very much wanted a family. I had heard from friends who had not changed their names to match their children's that it caused a lot of confusion. Teachers sometimes appeared unsure if they were their children's mother and it caused headaches when traveling.
Even before becoming pregnant, I knew I wanted to share a common name with my children to make it clear to everyone that we belonged together and were a family. I ran the idea of giving our children my last name to my husband, but he also wanted his children to share his last name. I briefly asked my husband if he would ever consider changing his last name. He immediately said no and so the decision was left solely in my hands.
As my wedding date grew closer, I became more comfortable with the idea of a name change. After all, my maiden name, "Davis," was not a long-standing family identifier. While my husband's family had long borne the last name "Smith," harkening back to a long-lost profession in Northern Europe, my family had a history of changing their last name.
My father, a first-generation American and the youngest of three was the first in his family to be given the last name Davis at birth. Before changing our family name to Davis, my Grandfather had changed his last name from Davidovitz to Davidovich, each time further obscuring his roots a little further. Many immigrants arriving in the US at that time adopted anglicized names, but for my Jewish family, it may have seemed essential at a time when the Nazis were rising to power. Plus, my father's older sister thought Davidovich was too hard for her teachers to spell and for her friends to pronounce.
This family history made it easier to become comfortable with the idea of shedding my last name and adopting a new one. Still, Davis was the only last name I had ever had. Although, in many ways, it was a newly created family name, it was still mine, and I didn't want to let it go completely.
I considered hyphenating my last name, which seemed cumbersome, and still wouldn't be the same last name as my husband and children. Eventually, I decided to use my maiden name as my middle name, a middle ground that would allow me to keep my old name and use a new one. We decided that we would give any sons we had the middle name of Davis, too, and our daughters' middle names would be the maiden names of our mothers. We would create a new family tradition.
After our wedding, I went to the Social Security office to make my new name, Jamie Davis Smith, official.
However, things didn't work out as planned. I started giving my name as Jamie Davis Smith everywhere. It caused mass confusion and continues to do so until this day.
Whenever I make a reservation, I never know if I will be listed under Davis or Smith. Concerningly, I have medical records filed under the wrong last name and confused with someone else. Airlines have listed my last name incorrectly, causing problems when I go to check in with a ticket that doesn't match the way my name appears on my passport. I get called "Mrs. Davis" frequently, and many people insert a hyphen between Davis and Smith, both of which frustrate me to no end.
Now, whenever I meet a woman getting married, I share that trying to have it both ways simply has not worked for me. If I could turn back time, I would choose another path. Perhaps I would hyphenate my last name after all, or choose to keep my maiden name or adopt my husband's. The one certain thing is that trying to find a middle ground, using a middle name as a last name, has not worked well for me. Still, I'm not ready to abandon being a Davis completely, and likely never will be, so I continue to try.
