ecsasyze 32

I'm going through another of my "i want to change my name" phases.
I'd like something more interesting and melodious than Glod.
(You may have thought Glod was my nom de plume.)

Mum had been a big fan of Goldie Hawn, so she planned to call her new baby Goldie. She was actually hoping for a boy to neatly follow her first daughter, so in fact Goldie was really only a runner-up option second to the preferred Bradley (after the English Astronomer James Bradley owing to her never-explained fascination at the time with the phenomenon of the aberration of light).

In the delivery room, however, things went horribly wrong. When i popped out - a daughter not a son - and the nurses were pressuring her for a name to put on the birth certificated, well the cocktail of other drugs that were permissible at the time, the exhaustion and after effects of a long and painful labour, and the whole experience in general, had left my mum wobbly and brain-fuzzy. The most the poor woman, not normally given to dyslexia, could manage with a limp and shaking hand, weak from gripping the sheets in the tension of the labour, was some scrawl that the staff interpreted as 'Glod'.

Dad, had he seen the error, would of course have pointed it out, but he was indisposed at the time. He'd had quite a serious skiing accident and was, in fact laid up in another ward in coincidentally the same hospital; plastered up, in traction, and generally feeling a bit sorry for himself. The news of my birth, i'm told, cheered him up and did help with his recovery and rehabilitation.

So that was it. My name was inked and official on the Government approved paperwork. They brought me home from the hospital and continued to call me Goldie and since it's what's on my birth certificate, it had to be used in all official circumstances. The first couple of roll-calls at each new school were hell. But unofficially 'Glod' very soon became some kind of cute replacement and i believe my sister could be responsible owing to her having just reached the speech-mastery stage at my birth and struggling adorably over all sorts of mispronunciations at that time. Thanks to her, our grandparents were Banana and Poop. And Glod just kind of stuck to me.

Each time i go through one of these phases of wanting to change, i then think about how much paperwork and bureaucracy will be involved. How many things officially have my name on it and how many people and institutions i'd have to notify. Passport, credit cards, birth certificate, drivers license, car registration, insurances, medical cover, employment and superannuation records, are just the beginning. It's far worse than moving house and notifying a change of address, and if the Land Titles Office are anything to go by, having to deal with all those Government Departments will be a tricky, time-swallowing, convoluted and really irritating set of procedures and mishaps.

And then i think, Geeeeze, all those women who change their surnames when they marry have to go thru all this? Who could be bothered? Thank God we're allowed to keep our own names if we wish.

Then, of course, there's the bigger question of if i DO change it, what to change it to? If the resultant paperwork's going to be such a nightmare, it better be a bloody good name. Something i'll be happy with for the rest of my entire life. Same reason i still haven't got that tattoo. Still can't be sure of a design that i won't tire of in a few years and one day wake up and look at it with embarrassed shame - like you do with that poetry you wrote when you were ten - and wonder "What WAS i thinking?"


Then, of course, there's the bigger question of if i DO change it, what to change it to? If the resultant paperwork's going to be such a nightmare, it better be a bloody good name. Something i'll be happy with for the rest of my entire life. Same reason i still haven't got that tattoo. Still can't be sure of a design that i won't tire of in a few years and one day wake up and look at it with embarrassed shame - like you do with that poetry you wrote when you were ten - and wonder "What WAS i thinking?"

That's why we like to invent, or have our friends invent, our own nicknames. Non-binding, fun alternatives to stupid decisions our parents made somewhat under duress, when we were too young to have an opinion. You just have to lead a slightly double life. I know a woman who is known to everyone in her world as Minnie (after that famous cartoon Mouse). But it's not her 'legal' name. I've seen her signature on official paperwork and it starts with an S, with no reference at all to Minnie. Although her parents probably named her Sheila in homage to the British actress Sheila Hancock O.B.E. i can understand her not wanting to be a generic (sometimes mildly derogatory) Aussie term for any woman.