LizWelsh.com

What’s in a Name? Letters!

The other day one of my editors (who goes by a hyphenated last name) asked me what name I’m going by these days. “Do you use Welsh or Avery-Welsh on your byline? We should put out an entire issue of a magazine written only by people with hyphenated last names,” he joked, referring to another editor of ours who hyphenated his name last year.

“I don’t know anymore what my name is, or care for that matter. I guess Welsh is fine for now,” I said.

But should I care, I wondered? His question and my question got me thinking about a chat I had a few weeks ago on a walk through the woods with a friend. He asked me–hypothetically–if one day I re-married, would I change my name?

I didn’t need a moment to think. “No, why would I?”

He countered, “But why would you want to keep the name Welsh, your ex-husband’s name?” which is a name I chose to adopt initially in my early twenties because I thought it would be “fun” and then kept after our split for practical reasons.

I hadn’t thought about the fact that it might be rude to refuse a new guy’s name in favor of my ex’s. All I knew was that I didn’t want to lose my business name or the name I’ve been published under for eight years, or have a last name different from my child. Plus, how would anyone know to “Follow Me” on Twitter, for chrissakes! The truth is, even though I don’t buy into—have never bought into—patriarchal naming customs (both patronymic and matronymic systems have inherent complications), I really don’t care all that much what my name is, aside from my aforementioned concerns. As William Shakespeare’s Juliet put it, “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet.”

But would it, really? I thought about why names are so meaningful to some. Why are they so heavy with pith, remembrance, and identity? My dog’s middle name is Lead-Guitar and he doesn’t even play, after all. Not to mention, I answer to the name John when my grandmother calls for me (her brain, hobbled by a stroke years ago, often defers to her late husband’s name).

I dug out and dusted off some genealogy books compiled by them. Grandpa had taught history, and throughout my childhood, family tree entries peeled off the pages like ghosts, their names swirling in my head—John D. Rockefeller, Anne Boleyn, Queen Elizabeth I, and Shirley Temple, to name a few—and I wondered if at some basic level I had let these names and their connotations imbue my identity.

For example, if the entries in our family tree and in Wikipedia are correct, my great-great-great grandfather, Miles Avery Rockefeller, was the uncle of the “richest man in history,” oil tycoon John D. Rockefeller. As a child I had hated Miles Avery for later disavowing his Rockefeller lineage, “an unusual family of entrepreneurs, capitalists, philanthropists, and statesmen,” thereby (as I surmised), robbing me of my fortune. Yet even in my painfully middle-class state, I still relished in that name that was hidden away in me like a recessive gene. It was a delicious thought.

Then I grew up and they invented Google. And in one search a more sordid secret was uncovered—that Miles was a bigamist who ran off with his housekeeper Ella Brussee, deserting his wife Eliza. Scandalous. As my father tells it, my great uncle “Chuck,” Charles Brussee Avery, their grandchild, hated the name Brussee because some teased him by pronouncing it brassier.

It’s funny, the nature of names. How, like the people they label, one can’t be all good or all bad. Names can burn like scarlet letters or sail us through admissions committees. Love affairs, deceit, and nobility of character. A name is but a handful of snapshots. If you’re lucky like Martha Stewart, the outtakes are forgotten.

The “other Boleyn girl” Mary, aunt of Queen Elizabeth I and sister of Queen Anne (whose head was of course lopped off after accusations of adultery, incest, and treason), is another of my great-great somethings who make ancestor-hunting so terrifyingly colorful. Mary Boleyn, ancestor of Miles Avery’s daughter Lucy, was allegedly not only sleeping with King Henry VIII but also took France’s King Francis I as a lover. Naughty.

I stopped my search when I found a name that I would have no qualms adopting. Darwin. There it was. My great-great Mary Boleyn’s relative. This is a name I thought I could get aligned with. A humble genius who made beautiful breakthroughs in my favorite science. A person with a conscience. “If the misery of the poor be caused not by the laws of nature, but by our institutions, great is our sin,” he said. Yes, I had found a name that meant something to me.

Or so I thought, until I stumbled upon another of his sentiments that I just can’t get behind: “I have tried lately to read Shakespeare,” Charles Darwin said, “and found it so intolerably dull that it nauseated me.” Blasphemous.

Juliet’s musings move me and make sense to me. Like Montague or Capulet, our names are simultaneously empty and pregnant with consequence. If I am someday asked to take someone’s name, perhaps I will emulate Juliet and stand on my back balcony gesturing dramatically down into the driveway at my true love: “What’s Welsh?” I’ll say. “It is nor hand, nor foot, nor arm, nor face, nor any other part belonging to a woman.”

But I’m not a poet. I’m not a scientist, a queen, a mistress, or millionaire. I’m a writer, and unlike some of my ancestors, my worldly desires are simple and few: a hot bath, a cold beer, a good man, and a crossword puzzle (all at once, if you don’t mind).

So I’ve decided, What’s in a name? Letters. What’s scribbled on my mailbox can wash away in the rain, but the contents of my mind and heart will never. They don’t need names, nor does the “he” in this post. He knows who he is. Like some of his other qualities, his embracing of a tradition that I call passé is at once head-shakingly silly and can’t-live-without-it endearing. It’s a quality I count on, because I need his embracing too. He knows by now I’ll never stop being that dork who’s careening down the highway in the night accidentally listening to Five for Fighting on Delilah. If he’s willing to live with those names, then I’ll happily live with his.

I’ll be there in five minutes with the Isthmus. Want to draw the bath?