photograph by karen pulfer focht
Anna and Cameron on their wedding day at the Shelby County Courthouse.
I’m thinking of changing my name. Again.
Two years ago, on October 10, 2019, my now-husband and I were married in a short and sweet courthouse ceremony. And I should mention here, before you come to any other conclusions, that we remain very happily wed. Happy anniversary to us! I should also mention that the decision to adopt a second surname (his) was mine alone; he did not (would not) exert any pressure about the matter.
I love the name I carried for my first 35 years: It’s a verb, it’s a mountain-climbing term, it sounds French-y. It makes you think of Mary Poppins (one P.L. Travers’ name is on the Poppins books’ spines, though this was, I was sorry to discover, a pseudonym). I also love my husband’s surname: Fogle means ‘bird,’ which struck me as a poetic companion to my own action-verb, perpetually-in-transit name.
And, I suppose, I liked the idea of making plain our status as a family. I was ready for the world to know that I was part of a larger unit, no longer a solitary entity. We even talked about combining our names into a new joint version, and we liked the odd mysticism of ‘Fogverse,’ which could be a setting in a fantasy novel, perhaps. But the idea of legally ridding ourselves of our respective surnames and becoming Anna and Cameron Fogverse — well, it sounded a little ridiculous. (In retrospect, hyphenating our names would have been the simpler choice, and may well be where we settle eventually.)
While no one minds if a woman wants to use her ‘maiden name’ (such an antiquated term, if you think about it) as a middle name in written correspondence, most everyone decides on your behalf to simplify your name in practice.
So I added a name, without removing any of the ones I started out with: Anna from my parents; Elizabeth, my middle name, after my grandmother; Traverse after my dad’s family; and Fogle, for my new family. If anything, I wanted to cram yet another name, Marshall, into the already crowded sequence. My mother, Cynthia Marshall, kept her name when she and my dad were married, and I always admired that decision. It made me proud, even (or especially) when a couple of neighbor kids would taunt me, claiming I was a ‘bastard child’ because my parents were clearly living in sin, based solely on their different last names. (They weren’t, but what of it?) But ‘Anna Elizabeth Traverse Marshall Fogle’ would be, even I had to admit, a bit much. Anna (Elizabeth) Traverse Fogle I would be.
But here’s what I found: While no one minds if a woman wants to use her ‘maiden name’ (such an antiquated term, if you think about it) as a middle name in written correspondence, most everyone decides on your behalf to simplify your name in practice. I began hearing myself referred to as ‘Anna Fogle,’ no Traverse to be seen for miles, almost immediately. Not to mention the strange new versions of my name I started seeing on mailing labels. My favorite, from a local arts organization: Mrs. Traverse A. Fogle. Say what? I don’t even know who that is, but she sounds cool (I also hear echoes of “We Three Kings”: “bearing gifts, we traverse a … fog.”)
Maybe there are just too many syllables. Maybe it doesn’t help that I added a less-than-ordinary name to a downright unusual name. Maybe people are simply not accustomed to the idea of having to keep up with three names instead of two, and the added effort exceeds the amount of mental energy folks want to expend.
Losing both my parents has made me more protective of my name. My father died late last year, and ever since, I have felt more insistent about not allowing Traverse to be erased or elided. I would feel the same if I had inherited my mother’s name, but our culture defaults (disappointingly, in my view) to patrilineage. And, as I have discovered, folks can’t seem to keep up with much complication when it comes to other people’s names. I get it, sort of, but I hope we are all quicker to adjust when, for instance, a friend or colleague takes a new name as part of a gender transition. Folks moving through that process surely deserve this simple grace.
I mention all this because October’s magazine is our annual women’s issue, a tradition about which I have expressed mixed feelings in years past. What I hope we’ve conveyed in the pages that follow is that there are as many ways of being a strong and dynamic woman as, well, there are women. No matter what she chooses to call herself.