This is the story about how I made up an entirely new identity. And why I chose not to take Scott’s name….

Romeo and Juliet is my favorite text to teach. Maybe I have an emotional attachment, as it is the first text I taught at Hampton High School in the winter of 2007. I remember distinctly walking in to my new job, on Valentine’s Day, and being thrust into Act 2 of this Shakespearean masterpiece. I was recently married then, and having a hard time adjusting to my new name. I had been Kozody for so long that adopting my new husband’s name was a challenge. I took comfort in the fact that new last name or not, I was still Alix.

“What’s in a name?” Juliet ponders.  At that point for me, not much. 

But I was 22 and society and tradition urged me to adopt my husband’s name and be done with it. 

And then I became Ms. T – a title that is etched into my heart as firmly as Hester Prynne’s scarlet letter.  

Ms. T is who I truly am. It isn’t about that last name that I clung to for dear life when my ex-husband left, it was the fact that every note from every student I had for ten years said “Dear Ms. T.”  My identity as a teacher is the one I feel is definitive, and my journey in that role has been the most important of my life. I stayed Ms. “T” and retained that last name only to feel closer to my students (and let’s be honest, paperwork is not fun) and adopted my middle name, Gilman, as my alias on social media so as to avoid the constant references to my divorce.  I became this new person, and basked in the fact that for the first time in my life, I was my own human. 

What’s in a name? Everything. 

dearmst-2

When I met Scott, I knew that if the impossible happened and we got married (you heard it here, impossible things can happen) I would make a bold choice and change my name.  But not to his last name: to mine. I legally became Gilman, a decision that is one of the few which I am most proud. 

I was very worried about how Scott would feel, having never been married, that his wife would choose to keep her own name. Our discussions were honest and open, and never did he question why I would choose this path. Rather, he supported it, rallying behind the rationale I gave and urging me to own this new identity.  But that’s Scott. And Scott is one in a million. 

So now, having shed previous names and embracing a new one, it’s still hard for those who never asked the question to understand why we aren’t “Mr. and Mrs. Scott Robinson.” It’s addressed to us on cards, mentioned in person, and teachers at my school have even assumed that Gilman was Scott’s name, and I was adjusting to life as a “Mrs.” While being newly married is an adjustment, it has nothing to do with the name.  

But if anything has come from this, it has taught me patience, and humility. I have been asked, rather garishly, why I wouldn’t take Scott’s name. And then I have to conjure up ways to diffuse a long oration about divorce, my life’s calling as a teacher, and my mid-30s rebellion against tradition. It’s always uncomfortable, I always see a bit of feigned acceptance and masqueraded judgement in the eyes of my questioner, and I leave the moment deflated. 

So to all the women who have had to reinvent themselves after a name-change gone awry: I get it. And guess what? Scott gets it. And you’ll never see a raised eyebrow from us. 

xo,

Ms. G.