When I got married, I didn’t change my name for a year.
I liked my name. Sabrina Blackner. It just sounded right. I didn’t want to change it. I didn’t like the idea that getting married changed my identity – the person I had been my whole life. Sure, I could still be the same person (with a different name) but something about changing my name seemed like I was changing who I was.
But, I lived in a conservative college town and was married to a conservative guy and my feminist killjoy was still off in the back of my mind and hadn’t yet overtaken my being so eventually I let him drag me to the social security office a whopping block from our house to get it done.
I regretted it as soon as I signed.
My ex-husband has an insanely common last name. He also has an insanely common first name, but that isn’t the point. His last name became mine and all of a sudden I felt more common. Less like me. You could no longer google my name and only stuff about me pop up. In fact, when you googled my married name some kidnapped girl was number one! What the heck?! I was getting overshadowed by a kidnapped girl? But overshadowed I became, not just on search engines.
I became a more common person, at least societally for where I was religiously at the time. I put my all into making sure my husband would be a good breadwinner and would have a good career. I worked jobs I hated but were extremely stereotypical (Nanny! Babysitter! Dumb office job! Server!) of someone who quit their education in order to put their spouses first. And by spouse I mean husband because I don’t know anyone other than women who do something like that. This went on for 8 years. I did it happily. I was glad that my husband was going to be able to give us the lifestyle we talked about for so long once he graduated. I was ecstatic that we were able to travel and my jobs contributed to us becoming debt free and being able to buy a house. I loved our life. I really did. I could have been happy there for a long time – maybe forever. We were planning on having kids next year. We had an entire life mapped out and it would have been great. But then my husband figured out he was gay and decided we shouldn’t be married anymore. And poof, all that was gone.
So here I am, about a month away from having my name back. Is it odd that it makes me feel less ordinary just thinking about being Sabrina Blackner again? Being a Blackner is the reason I feel like I can hike the Colorado Trail. It is the reason I know I’ll be able to make a really good career out of redoing houses with my dad and brother. Now that I am going to have my name back, I have to live up to it. I was never committed to my married last name. It was common, it was ordinary, and it wasn’t mine.
I’m back to Blackner and ready to kick some ass.
Back to Blackner 