60: (August 2019)
I’m scared. Ironically, I’m scared that people are going to give into and be overcome by fear. And that can lead to extreme behavior and extreme hate. And then a scourge is unleashed. We only have to glance at history here in the United States and around the world to track it, to see how that sort of hatred lays waste to society, leaving a wake of destruction and shame in its path. Leaving a deeply gashed wound that can fester.
We fear what we don’t know, don’t understand. We hear people in power goad us: These people threaten you! Your wellbeing, your security! Did my Irish grandparents suffer fearful looks of suspicion when they arrived from Ireland to New York in the early 1900s? Were my Italian great-grandparents feared when they started a new life in Brooklyn, a world so different from the Italian countryside where they had lived?
Now mainstream white America generally views Irish and Italians as “safe” ethnic groups. We’ve moved on as a society to more or less assimilate the European groups once vilified, and some segments of society have moved on to fearing Latinos. Or Africans. Or Muslims. Those who are perceived as different from “us”–descendants of white Christians who immigrated to America.
I am so weary of this. I want the fear and the hatred to go back in that genie’s bottle. We are not individual islands of humans. We are connected. What we do to others ultimately affects ourselves; just like in all of nature, we are one, big ecosystem.
My future son-in-law is Mexican. He and my daughter currently live in Mexico City. Should they decide to move to the United States someday, I want him to feel at home here. Unthreatened. Welcomed. Accepted and embraced for who he is and the beautiful gifts he has to offer to our beleaguered world.
40: (August 1999)
My Irish uncle recently inherited land in Ireland and is going to leave it to my brother in his will. My uncle has four daughters and talked with them about giving the property to the eldest. She generously suggested he give it to my brother, in order to keep it in the family name. My dad, who died 15 years ago, was extremely sentimental about Ireland and the family land. He would be pleased.
Names are powerful. My father and I were very close and the land also means a great deal to me. I gave up my maiden name when I married, as did my older sister and my married cousins. It is my brother who bears the family name in this generation, and his son carries my father’s full name into the next. Although my sister and I are older than my brother, he will get the inheritance.
My Irish sentimentality enables me to be happy that the property will remain in my father’s name. I consciously chose to give up my beloved name when I married—the name that linked me with the father I loved and lost—as a gift to my husband and the children I had hoped to have. I chose to take my husband’s name because I believe the symbolism of a family united by name is important. There is power in a name. Lots of it.
I am acutely aware that making that choice was a painful trade-off that carries another symbol as well. Giving up my maiden name was an unspoken submission to the status quo that enables the inequity to continue; the power in a name rests disproportionately in the male domain. If a family is to be united by name, it is usually the woman who gives up hers in order to make that possible.
Even among families in which the woman has kept her name, the children usually take the father’s. The mother’s name is, at best, hyphenated with the husband’s, and his has the prominent final position. Names carry not only feeling and history, but economic status. The loss of name has meant the loss of power, even loss of personhood, for women throughout history. To give one name up and take on another is an act that has many reverberations throughout time, even in our ostensibly modern society.
It is impossible to say which would have been the greater gift to my family, to my daughters—to give up my name for the sake of family unity, or to stand up to the inequity between genders by keeping my maiden name. In any event, never underestimate the power held within a name, or you just might lose the family farm.
60-40:
Well, a lot has changed since that post I wrote 20 years ago. I not only lost the family farm, but I lost my marriage. In the divorce process, I took back my family name, my “maiden” name. Second time around, I kept it. Enough said!
Words, language, how we define ourselves and others matters. If we recognize that power, perhaps we’ll exercise more care with the words we choose.
We are human. That’s our core label. We have hearts that beat. We suffer. We also have a great capacity to love, to create beauty. To sparkle like millions of facets on a cosmic geodesic diamond. Flawed? Yes. Human.
60-40 