WHAT’S IN A NAME? A LOT, I SAY
I am the one who had to endure squeezing out the bowling balls, says Eilis O’Hanlon, so I’m claiming the surname dibs
Halle Berry called her new baby Maceo. Which is a lovely name. I jest. It's hideous. Maceo is simply the name of a supermarket with an extra ‘o’ on the end to make it sound more exotic. From now on, I’ll be Eiliso. Meet my children — Lidlo and Costcuttero.
The real problem, though, is that the Hollywood star not only called the child Maceo, which was unforgivable enough in itself, but actually compounded the error by calling him Maceo Martinez, after the little boy's father, French actor Olivier Martinez. Not even a double-barrelled Berry-Martinez. Just straight-up Martinez. Why didn't she go the whole hog and buy herself a copy of The Surrendered Wife before dutifully ironing his beret?
Not that I'm making a case for double-barrelled names either. That's just the slippery slope to madness. Before you know it, a Berry-Martinez has married a Martinez-Berry, and the resulting children have to go through life being called Berry-Martinez-MartinezBerry. If they, in turn, marry someone called Ponsonby-Fitzwalter-Smythe, it's a vowel-and-consonant bloodbath.
But, seriously, why do so many women give their children the father's name? Out of all my female relatives and acquaintances, I think I'm the only one whose children have my surname rather than their father's. Even those who kept their own name after marriage — and don't get me started on the ones who change their name when getting hitched or we'll be here all day — succumb to the pressure once the babies start arriving.
You'd think letting us call our children after ourselves would be the least men could do, considering the fact that women are the ones who do all the actual hard graft of childbirth. Fathers get the fun part of pregnancy, right at the beginning. Mothers get the ‘squeezing a bowling ball through the eye of a needle’ part nine months later. Nine months that have been attended by so many indignities it makes being probed for drugs by a rubber-gloved South American prison officer seem a doddle.
Can I please call this product of my suffering after me? No, dear, you can't, that would break centuries of noble tradition and bring the social order crashing down around our ears. But you will get chocolates once a year on Mother’s Day. Plus, a full share of the guilt, should any of the children's lives turn out to be less than perfect.
Not me, though. I refused to bow down before the powers of patriarchal oppression. My children were going to be O'Hanlons, and that was that; and, thankfully, their father had no issue with it. He didn't feel his masculinity was threatened because our offspring were not being sent out into the world stamped with his seal of approval on their foreheads like the quality mark on an egg. Nor does he worry about who’ll carry on his family name after he’s gone. And since his name is much more common than mine, it's not as if a few less of them would be missed anyway.
But it does cause problems. When they find out that my children don't have their father's name, well-meaning people tend to assume they must be the product of a broken home, and put on that crinkly, compassionate face adopted by social services when they're assessing you for a possible intervention. Or else they think I'm some kind of harlot whose children have multiple fathers. You know — the kind of woman who appears on The Jeremy Kyle Show looking for a paternity test because the father of her (generally ugly) baby could be any possessor of a penis within a seven-county radius.
No, I say, they all have the same father, and he hasn't, as yet, run off and abandoned us. “Is he OK with them not having his name?” they want to know, as if I'd just told them he had an incurable disease. “No,” I reply, “he cries himself to sleep about it every night.” Sheesh.
Of course, they turn round and say: “But the name you've given them is just your own father's name, not yours at all.” Words which always seem to carry an implied “get out of that one, Miss Smarty Pants”. There may be some validity in what they say. But it's akin to refusing to fix the wonky floorboard on your stairs because that doesn't solve the problem of wonky floorboards everywhere.
The point remains. I'm an O'Hanlon. They're O'Hanlons. And, if any of them even consider taking some man's name in the future, they won't have to worry about what to call their children because I'll be getting out the scissors and taking direct action to ensure there aren’t any.
Chaps, you have been warned.
L