July 31, 2011

• reinventing myself

  

  it's august eve.  r is out with his friend for some man time (encouraged by me) and i just finished some vacuuming and dusting (yay!).  i've been on summer holiday for just about one month now, and i'm finally getting used to it.  i was seriously having trouble learning how to live without a 9-3 teacher day, but by week 2, i quickly threw myself into my summer job - changing my name.

  for some, this is the penultimate ritual and rite of passage into marriage-dom.  i know some people who are content to switch over on day 1, and even some more fanciful folks that start practicing their new names on the second date!  for me, the clincher came at a bar some months before we were married.  we were with some friends, all duly equipped with smart phones, and somehow we got around to "googling" our names.  some aspired to be number 1; some aspired to have the most entries.  me, i just wanted to be able to see myself free of all other identities that were not me.  i'm not a gymnast, physicist or teenage doodler.  incidentally, the teen turned out to be the most enterprising of us all, nabbing the precious (yet now defunct) "www.minakim.com" domain.  someone googled "mina leazer" and in subdued fanfare, there i saw it...a white page of nothing but (future) me.  i can't say i didn't sit a bit more smugly amongst all the guys who were there vying for top this, most that...but with a little two word name, there i was, topping them all.

  ha, i hope my haughtiness is not starting to choke here, but that was when the panic of potentially changing my name started to quell.  i actually wanted to change my name precisely because a fair number of my friends HADN'T.  what i had considered a causal relationship was not so with my friends, who have even since had children.  they go through the awkward times of registering their babies at daycare and in halting sentences insisting that they are the mother and yes, they have different last names.  i know in Korean culture, the bride keeps her name, but surely most of my friends seemed more American than that.

  and yet, the "new" American woman asserts independence and rights to her name as well - or by using a complex slew of hyphenations and dual names.  i had some Latina friends whose names eternally confused me as their names were the mirror images of their husbands and children whose names reflected the union and priority of names.  needless to say, changing a name seems to port a certain weight in any culture.

  r and i are a bit more "traditional" or "Midwest" in that sense.  there was never really a question of whether or not i would change my name - only one of how i might feel when i did it.  surprisingly, there was no drastic change when it happened.  a couple of hours at the social security office, an interview with a jaded officer who barely looked at me, and there was my new identity on an 3"x8.5" perforated paper.  i've since been tracing down all the minute locations where my name has inserted itself so i can update my identity - employer, health insurance, banks, driver's license.  perhaps the weight of shedding an old name hasn't quite hit me since the bureaucracy of it all has been so methodical...but little by little, i am realizing that i've got a new me to consider.

  so world, let me introduce you to mina leazer.  nice to meet you.

  • 10:31 pm
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