Subtitle: nothing like analyzing complicated functionality all day and coming home to have to analyze more complicated functionality.

I am going to be vague here. It was a letter from the bank, or so “we” thought (I hadn’t seen it). Turns out that it was actually a letter from the *corporation* that owns the bank. The local bank folks had no clue.

Backing up a bit. When I married the GG, I did not change my [maiden] name. I went straight on this, no hyphenated names or whatever (not dissing those who have done that). I’m not sure the GG was all that happy about my choice but he didn’t complain, at least not that I remember. There are a LOT of cFam folks but the Finfam name is kind of dying out, at least in our once-strong branch of Finfams. This is kind of silly in a way because I happily let my children be named after my husband. Never any question about that. It just means that I did not produce any children with the Finfam name. Maybe if I had married very young, I would’ve taken my husband’s name. I love the cFam name. But not at 28. Not me, anyway.

I use the GG’s cFam last name informally and with great love. I have done that for YEARS. All the way through the beach urchins’ childhood. On the Planet Ann Arbor, it is very common for married partners to use different last names and sometimes *neither* of them match the children’s names. I just didn’t care what people called me, cFam, FinFam, Mouse’s Mom, whatever, as long as it was polite.

Alas, whenever The Commander gifted me with something, she used the cFam name. This was okay when she wrote me a personal check, like a couple hundred bucks for a birthday gift or whatever. The bank didn’t care. It was not okay with gifts of stock or transfers of property. At least not eventually. I won’t detail how difficult it was to live through my family’s annus horribilis year (or three) when I was besieged with fugly lawyer letters passive agressively accusing me of things I didn’t do. As a side issue, I had to get my name corrected in a whole bunch of places. Fortunately by that time, I had a persistent young lawyer who figured it out and very capably managed it for me.

That aside, there are a still a few places where my name needs to be corrected. So I am working on that.

Parents everywhere! Please please please please respect your children’s choice of surname when they marry and please *use* their *legal* name when making official transfers of funds and property. Love you *anyway* Mrs. Commander.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 17th, 2019 at 6:43 pm and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.