The Perils of Hyphenation

I have a very long last name. Even before I got married, I had a long last name. Three syllables to be exact, and then I added a hyphen and three more, all in the name of maintaining my identity after marriage. A noble concept, and in theory, one I unhesitatingly stand by. In practice, well... I recall a conversation I had with my high school girlfriends at one of the first weddings to take place amoungst us. Our friend had taken her husband's last name, and I tsk-tsked. I tsk-tsked a lot about things I had no experience with in those days. One of my other friends responded by saying that keeping one's last name didn't properly acknowledge the major life change that had taken place, and another added that hyphenating was awkward. Both valid points, but all I could see were the flip-sides of those arguements, namely that the men in these scenarios were under no obligation to consider marking said life change and/or "awkwardly" ammending their identities. Getting hung up on that particular flip side of most arguments used to be my M.O., which is possibly why it took me so long to get married myself. My response was simply, confidently: "It's your identity. You should hold on to it any way you can." I now eat those words every time I check out at the grocery store and the checker stares wide-eyed at the name on my credit card and asks, as casually as they can, how do I pronounce my last name? As it turns out, credit card companies don't do hyphens. They just bunch my six syllables together and call it good. It also takes me about ten minutes to sign my name - at least it did when I still believed that one's signature should be legible. Somewhat surprisingly (is this, or is this not, the country where the feminist movement was born?), the mechanisms of our culture do not accomodate hyphenated last names. In my defense, when I finally got married and made the decision to hyphenate, I was living in a country whose current president was named Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. She hailed from a long legacy of prominent politicians, and to lose her maiden name would be to lose her political clout. I'm not comparing myself to the former president of Sri Lanka (however notorious she may be), nor am I suggesting I ever had any political clout. My point is simply that the context I lived in at the time was one of very long, very complicated names. And no one blinked at Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga. Why would anyone blink at mine? (Flawed logic on so many levels, given that in Sri Lanka, hyphenated or not, just Lydia was a tough name to pronounce; given that, I had no plans whatsoever to stay in Sri Lanka for more than a few years; given that, most of the people I've interacted with in my hyphenated life have no idea who Chandrika Bandaranaike Kumaratunga is. Sigh.) What's the big deal? you may be asking. Why be so stubborn about keeping my maiden name? Admittedly, a very small motivating factor was the little speech I made at my high school friend's wedding. At the time I had no idea whose last name I'd be hitching onto mine, so it was easy to posit the theory. Also, I've never been one to willingly eat crow, even small bits of it. Other factors? Well, if I'm being honest: vanity. I grew up in a relatively small town in southern Oregon where my athletic exploits gained me a degree of notariety (why can't I just say "fame?"). I hold more than a few records at my grade/middle/high schools. The local newspaper used to sing my praises with frequency, and it wasn't uncommon to see my young face in print (in various states of grimmace due to jumping/running/kicking/dribbling). As a parent of one of my peers pointed out to me, with a little more derision than necessary, those were my fifteen minutes of fame. The point is, I became accustomed to hearing my first and last name said together, heck, often even announced together over a loudspeaker, for most of my very young adulthood. Even though I was 28 when I got married, I thought that changing my last name would be tantamount to erasing that recognition and accomplishment, however faded. I wasn't ready to drop the well-known, comfortable aspects of my identity for what I considered a fresh, blank one. I was once a medium-large fish in a small pond after all. So I hoist my hyphenated name onto my back for every official moment of my life. I try to fit six syllables and a hyphen (and a first name) onto TINY signature lines, and every time I sign my very long name or repeat it over and over again for someone on the phone, I think about why I hyphenated. I think about who I was and who I am. And most days, I wouldn't have it any other way.