I suppose that most people take their names for granted, or assume that if they have one they hate, it’s to be put up with, like chronic acne or seasonal allergies.<\/p>
\nFor over 56 years, I carried a last name that I hated. It cast an unearned burden of shame and prejudice on a lifetime of decency and hard work. It represented unhappy memories of humiliation, exclusion and hostility.
\nI got rid of this last name about a year and a half ago and reclaimed the one to which I was born, my “real” name on my original birth certificate.
\nIt was a very expensive, long process to change my name, but doing so has changed life so much for the better that it was worth every penny and every minute.
\nSo, what’s in a name?
\nIn a word, everything.
\nYour name represents your past as well as your present. It is a binding to your heritage, or to one you voluntarily assume, as people sometimes do when they get married.
\nIt is not just an identification tag – your name is a statement of who you are, it helps people to define your character and to interpret your words and actions.
\nThe Commonwealth of Massachusetts, and no doubt it is not alone, has formalized the institutional practice of invalidating an adoptee’s original birth certificate.
\nAs it was explained to me, Massachusetts considers that an adoptee’s “real” birth certificate is the phoney one with the names of the adoptive family and not the original birth name.
\nIt is an assertion that money buys a human life. It is a falsehood perpetuating the belief that he who pays the bill owns a human being, a pretense that nine months of a birth mother’s life is somehow transferred in a commercial transaction to people with more money or a higher social status.
\nI am happy to have my old name back, and I wish that every adoptee would be lucky enough to be able to make the same choice that I did.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I suppose that most people take their names for granted, or assume that if they have one they hate, it’s to be put up with, like chronic acne or seasonal allergies.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-94","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=94"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/94\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=94"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=94"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thecapeblog.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=94"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}