changing your last name

I grew up as Sarah Hepburn.

But when I got married some nineteen years ago, I added “Smith” to the “Hepburn” and became “Hepburn-Smith”. It always felt funny. Was a bit of a mouthful. And I never answered to “Mrs. Smith”. It just didn’t occur to me to answer by that last name.

When we decided to get married, we were young. At least I felt young. I had not given a lot of thought to what life would look like once married. Or what kind of wedding I wanted. There were a lot of things I thought I wanted because it just seemed like the ‘natural’ thing to do and I had not questioned it. It was familiar. It is what I had known growing up.

I was marrying my best friend. I was excited to build a life together. But we were both naïve and neither of us had a clear picture of what we wanted out of life other than we would get to do it together.

At the time, the one thing I knew for certain was that I did not want to become “Sarah Smith”. Partly because the alliteration was too “Holly Hobby” for my liking but mostly because I felt that by dropping the Hepburn name, I would somehow lose a piece of myself. Before we were married, my now husband and I had a lot of conversations (cough … arguments) about me changing my name. He wanted me to become Smith because he felt it would unite us as a family. In the end we compromised. I hyphenated my name and we agreed that our future children would be Smith’s. We got married. I changed my name on all the things to Hepburn-Smith. And so it was.

But it always felt odd. And, as time went on, as we got busy and with the buzz of life, I could feel pieces of me fade into the background. I didn’t think about it as much. It was just what it was. But deep inside it always bugged me that I had changed my name.

As I have started to peel back the layers of myself in the past couple of years, I realized that I never wanted to change my name. In fact, the act of changing my name made me feel like I had lost parts of me. It was such a huge thing when we were getting married. We had argued. And in the end, we compromised. But really, I compromised. I compromised my sense of self.

My husband and I have talked about how it has made me feel. We talked about how it was so important to him to have one family name when we got married and how he doesn’t feel that way now at all. As he looked back to a hot July many years ago he shook his head thinking about how adamant he was about me changing my name. Funny how over time things that were once deal-breakers now fade in importance.

We will be married nineteen years this summer. And I am going to drop the Smith from my name. We are still married. We are still a team. But we have realized that you don’t need to have the same last name to be partners in life. We can very much be together as individuals.  

I am grateful for the gift of time. The gift of perspective. And the gift of knowing that nothing is permanent.

So here I am. Sarah Hepburn. Making a wee correction after nineteen years.

And, it just feels right. It is truly me.

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