I've been meaning to write about this since January, but kept on getting distracted. A wedding, buying an apartment, selling an apartment, and moving, not to mention working 40+ hours a week can be somewhat distracting.
The week after my wedding, it hit me: due to social norms and my adherence to an Orthodox lifestyle, I was being forced to actively question my identity- public and private. All of a sudden, I was being asked the same two questions by almost everyone I saw that week (and I saw A LOT of people that week):
1. Are you changing your name? How?
2. Are you going to cover your hair? How?
It's not like I only started to think about these questions after my wedding; on the contrary, they'd been on my mind for months before. But I just never quite put the two together to recognize what an impact it would have on my life and how difficult it would be to decide what my answers would be.
For both these questions, there are so many options. I can keep my last name, hyphenate both names, make my maiden name part of my middle name, or change my name completely by taking on my husband's last name or creating a new last name based on both. I already knew which options I would not take-keeping my last name was out of the question. Why? It just doesn't fit with my belief of what a marriage is. With all due respect to the women out there who have kept there last name or intend to keep it, having a different last name than my husband and/or kids makes things seem very individualistic- like I'm above, or somehow different than my family. A natural outcome of a marriage is forging one family unit (with or without children). Of course, each person within that unit is an individual and within each individual are seperate identities and shared identities, but the sum of the whole is greater then it's parts. As one unit, there should be one merged family identity.
Hyphenating was also not considered an option from the very beginning, but for more practical reasons. Just think about it: Rothschild-Jakabovics? What would the kids say? How would they fill out their SAT bubble sheets? They'd run out of room really quickly. For the sake of our family sanity, I couldn't do that. Some hyphenated names easily roll of the tongue, others, not so much...
But I still can't quite wrap my head around just dropping "Rothschild" completely. (Merging Jakabovics and Rothschild into one name also didn't quite make the cut.) I've lived 28 years with the name. I identify with it- not because of the history of the name itself (my family has no direct link to the wealthy and famous Baron), but because family means so much to me. If I drop the name, do I lose my intrinsic connection to everything that came before my wedding? What happens to everything I accomplished as "Elanit Rothschild"- the book I edited (royalties, baby!), the scholarships I won, the degrees I earned, the articles I wrote, and everything else out there associated with that name? And more simply, I've always been known by my initials, EZR (take a look at the name of this blog- there's meaning behind the words and phrase). Where does it all go? Does everything have to change?
These aren't easy questions to answer; if they were, my name would have already been officially changed. I continue to think twice when I introduce myself to colleagues and clients, when I am asked to fill out my personal information on forms, and when I sign my name. It's tough and I feel uncomfortable with the fact that it's been over two months and I am still undecided.
On the other hand, it continues to annoys me that people assume I changed my name. Out of blue, I received a statement in the mail from Macys addressed to "Elanit Jakabovics." I certainly didn't request a name change! They just assumed that since I registered with them and the wedding date has passed, that now my name has changed. But how do they know? How do the people in my community know? Or my family? Those who have written my name as "Elanit Jakabovics" haven't asked; they just assumed it was so. That bothers me.
It bothers me because they don't recognize the difficulty in all of this. They take it for granted, or it is just expected, that automatically change their name once they get marrierd. But that's not the case, especially not in the 21st Century.
It's a question of identity. Most men don't have to go through this process, but many women do. And especially Jewish women. At different points in our lives, we are asked to make changes to ourselves that force us to shift our perspective on who we are. It may seem petty or even insignificant to some, but in truth, at least to me, it strikes at the core of who I see myself to be, what image I want to project for myself, and how I relate to myself and others.
So the easy way out of this, it seems, is to shift my maiden name to be my second middle name. And as of now, that's the name I have associated with my email address. But I'm not sure it's going to stick. For one, it's a real mouthful. Will I just get tired of it after a while and decide to just stick with one middle name and one last name and be done with it? Will I go by one name professionally and another name socially? I don't want this to be difficult, annoying, and confusing for people, but it's difficult, annoying, and confusing for myself.
I haven't yet made any official changes- we're flying internationally next week and I didn't have enough time to change my passport before purchasing the tickets; that was a real good excuse to just push this decision further down the line. But I'm afraid that by the time I do decide, it will be too late from a public perspective, since everyone knows I got married in January, so what am I doing only deciding to change my name in May?
The hair covering issue gets to the same points. I don't feel strongly either way, so I'm covering my hair by default when I'm not at work and not at home (broadly defined to include my families' homes as well). Why? I don't know. I learned the sources and reasoning behind the
halacha, I can't say I'm terribly convinced, but I'm doing it nonetheless. Some will think it's because of social pressure. But I can truthfully say that it's not. A friend of mine said to me a few days before the wedding that he would afford me tremendous respect if I
didn't cover my hair after I got married, because, according to his logic, the reasoning doesn't make sense. I thought about that for a little bit- but I guess if I cared what others thought of me, I would specifically decide to not cover my hair so that this person would respect me more, right?
But regardless of how I practice, I still struggle with the meaning of it all. Why is it that women are forced to confront these issues head-on more often then men? I was pretty comfortable with myself before all this. I'm mostly pretty comfortable with myself now, but still feel unsettled about all of it. Am I blowing it all out of proportion?
Labels: hair, identity, names
