Birth Registration

We registered the Peanut’s birth online.  Isn’t technology great? ServiceOntario’s site required that both parents be at the computer so they could both check off the appropriate boxes attesting to the veracity of the information entered on the form. And because I’m a little rule-follower, I kept reading to S what I was entering as well as all the legal boilerplate.  Lucky for me she found this all to be cute, not annoying.

Much earlier, when we had been negotiating with a known donor, we decided that our child would have my last name.  S and the donor would have biology on their side, but I’d have the name.  Let ‘em figure out who the “real” mother is now!!  But once we moved to an anonymous (ID release) donor, it didn’t seem as important to me to have the same last name as our child any more. 

So here I was registering his birth and I asked “are you sure about the last name?”  The urgency I felt to carve out a niche for myself feels pretty non-existant right one.  One reason could be that I’m the “Other Parent” on the birth registration form (with S’s permission, of course). Another could be that I no longer feel the threat of people considering a known donor to be the other parent.  Another could be that no one has challenged my parenthood yet.  The midwives have been great, our families and friends and colleagues are great.  Even the OBGYN seemed to assume I’d be cutting the cord at the birth (which I did– and, for the record, I cried).

But yes, S was sure that our baby should have my last name.  And now he does.  I’m a father in every sense except for the gender bit. 

S’s mom put a birth announcement in her local paper.  And there it was – his first name and my last name (and his super cute picture).  It looked so strange for some reason – my last name instead of his (as though he would arrive as part of a kit including a name). I suppose one reason for the strangeness was because it looked so short – I was used to telling people the full name including the middle. But seeing the last name, and thinking about the importance we put on that name reminded me of when I got a divorce and my ex-husband demanded I stop using his last name. This was fine with me, since I was ambivalent about having assumed it in the first place.  But the fact that he was demanding it was weird. “I want my name back”, like it was chattel or had value.  At that time I thought to myself  “do I go back to my own last name — which is simply a name belonging to yet another man — or do I come up with one of my own?  Or just go by Lynn X”. What does it mean to carry a man’s name your whole life?  When do you become your own person?  When does a woman stop being chattel?  In the end, I chose to continue to use the name I was given at birth.  Because it was my name, after all.  I lay claim to all of it. And also because, let’s face it,  I had begun to really overanalyse the whole thing.

So now the Peanut has been given his name.  And at first it looked to me like his first name was his but the last name was mine.  But instead of starting that whole overanalysing thing, I will view the names as all being his.  He can lay claim to all of it.