My Name Is

Hello. My name is Katy Jacob. That's right. Katy with a Y, Jacob with no S. I did not say Jacobs, nor Jacobson. I am not Katie nor so help me God Kathy. The only person who calls me Kathleen is my mother, if she's channeling the 80s and pretending to be mad at me, or all of those folks who need me to sign the legal name on the dotted line.

This doesn't strike me as difficult. My name is only 9 letters long. It is not hard to pronounce. But people just can't handle it for some reason. This just seems like sloth if you ask me, this idea that we can't be bothered to call people what they would like to be called. I mean, can you imagine if we all sat around and called it Channel, as in English Channel? The French might get pissed. And we wouldn't want that.

Sometimes, I find myself writing an email at work, and I receive a response to Dear Katie. And I wonder how it can be that someone would miss THE WAY I SPELLED MY NAME IN THE MESSAGE I JUST WROTE TO HER. For almost six years, I have had an email address at work that is almost totally worthless, so I end up using a different one with an odd convention. Before I was hired, someone decided that I would be kathleen.jacob. When I started on my first day (in an office correctly labeled "Katy Jacob") I asked to have it changed and was told that was impossible. Now, Chicago's offensive line protecting its quarterback is impossible. Changing an email address? Doubtful. I informed IT that I had a lot of contacts, and not a single one of them would know who the hell Kathleen Jacob was. They ignored me. To this day, I have colleagues who have known me for 10 years who write an email that begins "um, Kathleen, is this actually Katy Jacob? Is that you?"

And don't get me started on the fact that I kept my so-called "maiden" name (where my maidens at? milking?). Yes, it's true. The other three members of my immediate family have a different last name than mine. This does not strike me as complicated, nor interesting. By the time I got married at age 29, I had established a solid career for myself; there were dozens of publications using the name Katy Jacob (no, I did not resort to a more "sophisticated" name when I got published) and everyone knew me by that name. But I won't pretend for a minute that that's why I kept my name. I just had no interest in changing it. It seemed like a pain in the ass, and my name had served me well for almost 30 years.

As an aside, I've never understood this argument that if you have different names, you will end up fighting about what names to give your kids. If you are going to raise kids together, you're going to have bigger problems. I figure that the person who cares more, wins. Because God help us all if we had decided to hyphenate, because in the back of my mind I have always wondered what happens when two hyphenated people get together. Do their kids have four names? Do they just give up and turn their name into a graphic symbol, like TAFKAP did? Well, in our case, it didn't matter, because neither of us cared.

So, I kept my name and the kids got Gabe's name, and that was mainly my decision. Inside I was thinking, ha! now try and deny that paternity, sucker! because I am a little bit of a cynical person. And I didn't feel the need to prove to anyone that those kids were mine, because, you know, they grew inside my body for nine months and then I pushed them into the world, endoskeletons and all--THROUGH MY VAGINA. I am not trying to have to prove they're mine after that, NO SIR.

Gabe, being a guy, could have cared more, I suppose, and in a way, he did. And no, I don't mean that he had some caveman attitude about his woman having his name or proving that he's the real baby daddy. He actually wanted to change his name to mine. He has no attachment to his last name. It's not his father's name--it's the name of the guy his mom was married to before she met his dad. So, there is one other person in Gabe's family with his name, which belongs to some dude he's never met (not that he's met his father, either).

I told him there was no reason to change his name. He said, but then we would be the same and that would be romantic! I sighed, wondering how deep this whole gender role reversal thing was going to be in our lives. I told him he would decide against it. A few days later he came at me all pissed off, saying, do you know that for a man to change his name to his wife's in Illinois, you have to pay money and go to court and GET PERMISSION? He didn't even get to the normal part about changing his social security card etc. He never got past the disparity where women can change their names to their husbands', no questions asked...but men could not do the same.

I sighed again. OK, you could make this political. Or just admit that it's a pain in the ass, and keep your damn name.

I mean, really, who cares? Years ago, when I was about 20 and working an internship over the summer, I got into this conversation with an older colleague who was all shades of BITTER that his wife kept her name. He went on and on about how CONFUSING it was, especially with the kids at their schools and doctors, and how people at hotels thought they were having an affair because their names were different yadda yadda.

And I countered: Really? Because this is Chicago. Half of the kids growing up in this city are born to single parents, most of whom don't share their last name. Are you telling me they don't go to the doctor? Or go to school? Kids are raised by grandparents, neighbors, hell some kids aren't raised at all. There's no one in this town who is balking at some different last name bullshit.

And then there's the hotel argument. Now, let's be honest. What hotel employee on earth gives a shit if you are having an affair? What hotel employee even notices that you are there? The first time I went on a "trip" with a boyfriend that involved a hotel and not a campsite, I was probably 21, broke, and oblivious. We walked into some motel in southern Illinois, this young, interracial couple with no rings anywhere near our fingers, and the bored concierge looked at us with hostility and asked in a threatening voice:

Do you have a credit card?

I could have said that he'd kidnapped me. I could have said that we were part of a cult that survived on a diet of kittens. I could have said ANYTHING, and she would have asked DO YOU HAVE A CREDIT CARD. Once I handed the card over, it could have had his name on it or the President's, and it would have been all the same to her.

Now I am not saying that people shouldn't change their names. I understand that some people feel strongly about this one way or the other. I'm just putting it out there that I don't. I know there are arguments about being a cohesive family unit and all of that. But cohesive isn't my strong suit. I can appreciate the whole same name thing though. Hell, it makes it easier for me if you do keep it all the same. I can call you the Jacksons or write holiday cards to the Jackson family. It enables my laziness.

But people should get to claim their names, you know? Don't call me something else. And don't--DO NOT--try and tell my kids they should have different names. Lenny's at a new school (correction--she was there, before the strike--maybe 4 days of first grade is enough?) and her teacher is insisting on calling her Lenora. It's something about calling them by their "real" names before they can go by their "nicknames." So my kid is convinced she'll get in trouble, be expelled to the land of unruly nicknamed children, if she writes "Lenny" on her homework or asks to be called that.

So I did what any good mom would do in this situation. I told her to break the rules and not worry about it because her name is Lenny. I mean look, that's how she autographs her artwork. One name--like Cher. I remembered when I was in college and I had a professor who insisted on calling me Kathleen because "it's a beautiful Irish name." Um, I'm not Irish. And I don't respond to that--please call me Katy. And this pretentious guy, who called his wife his "lover" and made us meet for class AT HIS HOUSE, kept up with Kathleen until he realized that I wasn't Irish, I was mostly German and stubborn as hell, and he gave up. I remembered when Lenny was not even 18 months old, and she shouldn't have been able to talk, much less express this thought, and she told her daycare providers who insisted on calling her Lenora "I'm NOT Lenora. I'M LENNY."

And she is. She always has been. There's only one Lenny. You can tell me it's a boy's name, and I would have to ask: how many little boys do you know named Lenny? I mean, besides the ones who play whiskey-swilling Chicago gangsters on TV? As far as I know, there's one Lenny. And she knows, on some level, how awesome her name is. How many kids are named after Stevie Ray Vaughan's guitar? Yeah, that's right. Who needs a baby name book when you have pop culture? When people would ask my mom how she chose my brother's name, which was odd at the time, she probably just smiled and let them think about the Bible. But we knew the truth. Remember the Rifleman? Lucas McCain? Yeah, Lucas.

I think about Augie, the kid who didn't have a nickname until he was born. We thought we might call him A.J., since his middle name is my last name. But then he was in the world, and he was SUCH an Augie. I can't imagine it any other way. People, men especially, tried calling him A.J. for a while--but only until they got to know him.

I remember when I was doing online dating and I thought I would just give up on the whole of humanity if I met one more guy named Brian or David or Michael (even when his name was actually Ron, but really, can you blame him?). I started dating guys who had more unique names just so I could remember who the hell they were. Guys with names like Gabe, which is so common now, but almost unheard of in my generation.

If you meet Gabe, he will shake your hand and introduce himself as Gabriel. That is because he will assume that you are a jackass who would otherwise hear him say hi I'm Gabe, and you will respond, oh nice to meet you DAVE. So he goes with Gabriel.

But here's the problem. His name is not Gabriel. I'm pretty sure his legal name is Gabe. It's hard to tell, because he was born on a commune and his birth certificate is not entirely normal, but I think it's just Gabe. This could be a problem, since it says Gabriel on our marriage license. Sometimes I wonder if anyone will ever decide that our marriage is somehow null and void due to this, and then if the election goes a certain way, will we be put in prison camps or something for being people who have lived in sin for years, bound for an express train straight to hell with all the other people who use birth control or pay a high percentage of their income in taxes or do REALLY REALLY bad things like make abortion jokes while they're hanging out at Planned Parenthood? I mean, you add in the weird birth certificate and the commune and, well, we're toast.

But I know something you don't know. There's another reason he introduces himself as Gabriel. It's BECAUSE his mom didn't name him that, and she decided to give him a unique middle name as well: Lincoln.

That's right. His name is Gabe Lincoln.

Just take a minute to digest that information. And realize that if he wants it to be Gabriel, who am I to argue? After all, we're married. I have all kinds of other names for him. Most of them are just between the two of us. Others are just too good not to share.

Right, Gabraham?