What's In A Name?

When I decided to start this blog it was on the advice of a friend of mine, who I was dating at the time, who was obsessed himself with the past time. I’ve always had such funny, crazy stories to tell from my nights out clubbing that he felt it would be worth while to put them all in one place. I’ve always tried to stick with that as a topic and leave the rest of my life a somewhat mystery.
Now I really feel like this is a scrap book for my “twenty-something” years. Thirty seems to be rushing up on me and I appreciate my life more and more as I go back and read. I can calm the mortal question of “did I live my life when I could?” I find myself writing more about things happening in my life other than clubbing, since that’s pretty much dropped off, even if my passion for the music hasn’t.
Yesterday something meaningful happened; something that was about four years overdue. Those who know me understand that my divorce is a messy subject, but not in the traditional sense. I’ve always avoided talking about my failed marriage because when I started writing this blog I wanted to live again and ignore that the past had happened. That and I quickly learned that at 24-25 years of age, men freak out at the “D” word. Some how the fact that I had been married before meant I was obviously on the hunt for another husband and 25 there isn’t anything more frightening than that. The misconception couldn’t have been farther from the truth.
I was a statistic. Even though I had married with all the bright-eyed ideals of someone who thought she knew what she could handle, I was just another civilian-dependant who was standing in line to get her marriage dissolved because her spouse had found someone else overseas far more interesting than the vows he had made over a year before. Compared to the other divorces that occurred at the same time as mine, within my husband’s medical unit that had just returned from Iraq, mine was depressingly simple. I took my stuff, he took his and away we went. I had spent two years separated from him for one reason or another, only to find the ultimate separation just left me cold and sad.
He couldn’t even stick out the actual dissolution proceeding in the court room. He left to play in an Army – Air Force football game and I made the walk of shame to the judge’s bench completely unprepared as to how to proceed. My husband had been the one to do all the paperwork, I had only signed where I had been told to. It was mortifying to struggle through handing over the correct sheets of paper and not fall apart. The roommate that he had left behind to “take care of me” only proceeded to hit on me and tell me all sorts of horrible things about the attitude of marriage and the necessity for relationships (read: random sex) while in a war zone as he took me home from the court house.
That was December, 3 2004. The one thing I had been very firm about in the paperwork was making sure the right to change my name back was included. Yet after the marriage was dissolved I couldn’t get up the motivation to return to the court house in order to get my paperwork and proceed with the name change. The court house was this place of horror for me that I just couldn’t get over and haven’t in the last four years. I convinced myself that I was broke and just needed to wait for my driver’s license to expire so I wouldn’t be paying for it twice. I know I also felt like it had just been yesterday that I had gone through the intense hassle of getting my name changed after the wedding. The idea of going through it in reverse made me immediately exhausted.
As I had promised myself, this November I knew my driver’s license was up for renewal on my birthday in December. I started getting my paperwork together and trying to figure out my game plan. That was when I realized that my silly little expenditure of ordering the divorce certificate over the internet, in order to avoid actually visiting the court house myself, had been a waste of twenty-two dollars. It was indeed proof of my single status; it wasn’t what I needed in order to prove that I had already obtained the legal right to change my name. One does not automatically equal the other which seems absolutely ridiculous. A woman doesn’t need a separate legal document stating that her name will officially be changed to something specific when she signs her marriage license. Why when she gets divorced she has to jump through a separate flaming hoop to get her birth-name back?
I was going to have to visit the court house, and there was no way around it. Along with several other insane catch-22 type situations involving the lien holder for my car loan and getting my Volkswagen registered to the correct last name, I realized I wasn’t going to get what I wanted done in time. I barely got my driver’s license renewed in-time thanks to the weather. Most of December had been wasted until a terrible snow storm that wouldn’t quit killed what free days I had, that the holidays hadn’t already taken away from me.
New Years went and I had to realize what a retarded waste of time I had spent waiting for “my driver’s license to expire”. I was going to pay twice for it after all. Yet I started noticing a strange pattern of bad things happening whenever I decided I was going to make an official trip to the court house. From snow, sickness of either me or someone else, to being kicked out of town by the cops, it seemed without fail something managed to prevent or successfully discourage me, not that it took much.
I’m not even sure what made me really put my foot down yesterday and go through with it. When it started dumping snow on Highway 18 as I headed south I could only shake my head. It was so random for it to be snowing at all, but of course it was on the day that I was REALLY determined.
I made it though, this time I really did it. With only a little hitch at the metal detector where the man asked me to take off my belt and I surprised him by just taking off the detachable buckle, the rest was a piece of cake. The people in the County Clerk’s Office were helpful and really nice. The man making my certified copies was hilarious as he doubled my copy fee every time I agreed to the charge.
None of that was more than a sense of accomplishment for the task at hand until the man made the last official stamp and flipped to the last page where it stated what my name would be legally changed to. Reading it out loud he looked at me as if to see if I would respond to it. Since the divorce I had slowly reverted little things into my maiden name and all my friends had made the switch long ago. It wasn’t as if I hadn’t heard my full name giving to me at birth in ages. I heard it at least once a day. But it was when this man at the County Clerk’s Office said it out loud that I really felt like it was done. I was finally me again. My only response was “Yes Sir” and to give him the biggest smile I had.
What’s in a name? A lot, but I hadn’t really felt it until that moment. That is who I am and I am very proud of both my heritage and my family. There’s still a castle and an acting clan in Scotland where our name comes from. That’s something tangible, not just letters of the alphabet that some see in their names. Aside from that it’s letting go of someone who I have no attachment to. I want no part of his life, and so I don’t want his name anymore. I can’t say that I’ll get married again. I’m not even sure if I want to, but if I do, damn it – I’m going to hyphenate the next time!