My Husband’s Name or Mine? I Need Them Both

My Husband’s Name or Mine?

The first draft of my taxes came back from the tax preparer last month. They were prepared for someone called Barbara Newhall.

Barbara Newhall. Who’s that?

Barbara Newhall is no one. Barbara Newhall is a female first name, Barbara, tacked on to a family last name, Newhall.

They’re a nice family, those Newhalls, people I’ve been proud and contented to be folded into these past 46 years.

Having It Both Ways

But on the day Jon and I married, when I took his name, I made a point of holding on to my own as well, and I’ve been Barbara Falconer Newhall ever since.

The name suits me. It describes me. Barbara, a member of the Falconer family, who joined a second family, the Newhalls, on a sunlit Southern California  day in 1977.

To be thought of or referred to as Barbara Newhall on a tax form or a book group roster or a medical bill makes me feel erased, non-existent, as if the true me had never been.

Yes, I was and am a Newhall. But that other person, Barbara Falconer, has never gone away:

She’s the third-grader who was best friends with Judy Klann at Ann Arbor Trail School in Detroit.

She’s the teenaged swimmer in suburban Detroit with a back stroke almost good enough to make the swim team.

She’s the freshman falling asleep over The Iliad in the musty stacks of the Graduate Library at the University of Michigan.

She’s indelible.

I Took His Name

I made the decision to add Jon’s name to mine  because I wanted to be a family with him and with any children we might have. There was  no need to ask — my husband’s name or mine? I’d have it both ways.

(Both kids, once they came along, inherited Falconer as their middle names. Over the years, I invited Jon more than once to put my name in the middle of his. He declined each time, firmly.)

In social contexts, I’ll often keep things simple by referring to myself as Barbara Newhall. But I tuck in Falconer wherever I can — on the Zoom ID, on the credit card, when leaving a voicemail message.

I want people to know who I am, the whole me.

When my brother-in-law assembled the Newhall family genealogy several years ago, he had me — and the other female add-ons — listed by first name only.

Who’s that Beatrice? I asked him. That Constance? That Lita?  Those woman are people, I protested. They have names and genealogies of their own. They’ve added to the family gene pool. They need to be inked in.

My brother-in-law knew a convicted feminist when he saw one. His mother, Ruth Waldo Newhall, was one of them. The next time the family tree came out, all its women were fully named and accounted for.

Retired? Really?

My tax preparer made more than one assumption about me as he drew up that first draft. Besides assuming that I was content to be known as my husband’s wife, he assumed that I was done with my career. Under occupation, he put me down as “retired.”

I guess he figured from the paperwork I’d sent him that I was pretty darned old and, therefore, retired.

I am not retired. I’m a writer working away on her book projects, holding on to all of her identities.