A Rose by any other name...

I thought I was all English rose and primrose, turns out I’m half poisonous wolfsbane

Photo of primroses by henry perks on Unsplash

Mistaken Identity, Again

A couple years ago, nearing the end of my postdoctoral fellowship at Université du Québec à Trois-Rivières (UQTR), I opened my UQTR email account to a name I hadn’t read in over 25 years. I stared at the recipient’s name, my name, altered from the day before. I had been Tracey Edelist for most of my work life, yet the name Tracey Monk was now in the “to” field, the ghost of my former self showing up unwanted and unannounced.

When I first agreed to do the postdoc, not being fluent in French I relied on my supervisor to help me with administration tasks and applying for the related postdoc scholarship. Her project required critical perspectives not often found within speech-language pathology (SLP) and she had sought me out because I was a critical disability studies scholar with an SLP background. Being from Ontario and not Quebec, an Anglophone and not a Francophone, and the process being a new one for the university, the paperwork was time-consuming and confusing. Thanks to the administration work she did on my behalf, we managed to sort things out for the first few semesters.

The postdoc began two months after the discovery that my dad was not my biological father. The wound was fresh and I was struggling to make sense of my new identity as half Italian, of having been raised by two parents with no biological connection to me and losing the assumed connection with my half-sisters with whom I no longer shared DNA. So when one of the first fields to fill out on the university paperwork was my parents’ names, I panicked. I was 50 years old, why were my parents’ names at all relevant to the university? Whose names should I enter? Why was it any of their business?

Technically, to be consistent with other government documents, I would have had to list my dad and my birth mother as my parents, and neither seemed quite right at the time. One was a man who raised me with love but who I had just learned was not my biological father, and the other, a woman who was never a parent to me. In protest, and because my confused state of mind left me unable to reply, I entered “n/a,” not applicable – anything else seemed a lie. I was relieved when no administrator contacted me about the missing information, perhaps because my lovely supervisor explained my situation to the bureaucrats.

My unreliable memory has me wondering whose names I provided on my application to McGill (an English language university in Quebec) decades ago. During my childhood, there was no question of who I would name as my parents. My parents were my dad and my mom (the step-mom who raised me). But mom’s name would not have matched the name on my birth certificate – she never legally adopted me. I don’t recall being confronted with any discrepancies when I was a student at McGill, perhaps because my last name at the time matched my dad’s.

A year after omitting my parents’ names from UQTR’s paperwork, I received the email about my registration for the next term, with a new (old) name on my email account and a new university identification number, both altered to the surname that was on my birth certificate, a name I changed in 1997 when I married. I had taken my husband’s last name because my childhood surname never felt right to me, and because I wanted the same last name as my kids, a name that would reflect their Jewish background and my new Jewish identity. Yet, without warning, my UQTR email address and affiliated name had become Tracey Monk. I felt as if I were in my early 20’s back in the master’s program at McGill, before I was married and had children, long before I obtained my PhD. I was angry and shocked, not understanding how a change to MY legal name, could be made without my permission. It felt like they were imposing an identity onto me that wasn’t mine, throwing buckets of salt in the wound caused by the DNA discovery. In the midst of processing the change to my DNA identity and what it meant about who I was in relation to others in this world, what might have been a humorous inconvenience to some fed my identity crisis.

The imposed name change didn’t only cause internal turmoil, it made my name unrecognizable to my colleagues. I couldn’t use that email address for official communications because colleagues wouldn’t recognize the name in their inboxes as mine. All my academic articles are in my legal name, and colleagues and friends know me only by that name. Official documents such as tax forms would be useless, since all my Ontario and Canadian identification is under my legal name. I was livid over the injustice of this forced name change on a citizen of Ontario to fit Quebec’s cultural and bureaucratic rules, and wondered how new immigrants are treated. I felt dismissed and wiped out, the thin thread of healing I’d been working on pulled apart.

I discovered that the university, following Quebec’s Ministry of Education’s rules, unilaterally decided what name I should have based on my birth certificate, the document that names a birth mother I barely knew and my dad, who is not my birth father. In doing so, they erased both my chosen identity and the new identity I was working through. I was also angry for trans people or anyone, married or not, who changed their name for whatever reason. How could the Quebec government impose a name and identity on people like that? It took two weeks and many documents exchanged to have my official UQTR name and email address changed back, although it felt like much longer.

The problem stems from it being illegal for women in Quebec to change their surname when they get married, – women must keep their original surname as stated on their birth certificate – a rule different than the rest of Canada. Even if married outside of Quebec, if you reside in Quebec, you must use your birth certificate surname on all official documentation. What made no sense, was that I didn’t reside in Quebec so the rule should not have applied to me. There were apparently good intentions behind the law, to change the societal pressure women face to take their husband’s name when they marry, but isn’t it also paternalistic to make it illegal for a woman to choose to change her name? In the rest of Canada, a woman is free to choose whether she changes her name or not, as is a man. But I’m getting off-topic here.

The imposed name change debacle is an example of how names and identity intermingle and wreak havoc for someone who’s navigating a DNA surprise. While the university was trying to tell me what my name should be, I was considering changing my name to include my paternal DNA family’s last name. But how would that make my dad feel? And why was I still making decisions based on how others may or may not feel? I wanted a name that represented who I had always been and didn’t know. I wanted an Italian name to claim that part of myself kept hidden from me, to signal to myself and others that I was Italian. After broaching the topic with my DNA father, I started to use it in my work email signature later that year, and then in my creative writing. Tracey Ciccone Edelist.

AKA Elena Vera?

Before this, when writing first became necessary for life after the DNA discovery, I was afraid of revealing other people’s secrets through writing my story so I gave myself an Italian-sounding pen name, Elena Vera, or E.C. Vera. In part, it was for anonymity, to protect family members from being identified through my writing, and to protect myself from family members finding my writing. Mostly, it’s because I’ve always felt detached from myself, not quite sure of who I am, not quite fitting in anywhere, with a name – both first and last – that didn’t feel right to me. Until the last couple years, I haven’t felt at home in my body and my name felt like it belonged to someone else. I’ve learned that it’s not unusual for survivors of childhood trauma to want to change their name, the name itself being attached to traumatic memories of childhood, and in a recent survey, 20% of people who discover misattributed parentage reported thinking about changing their name.

Our names tell things about us. I was named after an uncle in my birth mother’s family, an “e” added to Tracy to make it more feminine. My last name was my dad’s, signalling my belonging to his family: Tracey Monk, or Tacey Muck as I would pronounce before my tongue could shape the sounds. As a sensitive, shy child, I thought it safer to stay quiet than to speak. I would be teased about being silent as a Monk. I’d also be called monkey, with accompanying animal noses and scratching of armpits, or maybe that was my imagination. A tiny trouble-making boy in Grade 7 would sing “Shock the monkey,” when he saw me in the halls. Oh how I hated him, and that last name. It would be years before I realized he meant no harm and possibly even had a crush on me.

As a child, I lived with the knowledge my birth mother chose to leave me and I was regularly exposed to the person who sexually abused me. I therefore lived in a heightened emotional state, always on guard and ready for flight. Moving every couple years and being bullied added to feeling out of place with my peers, and being teased confirmed that there was indeed something wrong with me. Tracey Monk wanted to hide. I realize that changing my name doesn’t change my character traits, but it does make me feel a little more in control of my identity and how I see myself.

Photo of Wolfsbane by T R on Unsplash

I thought I was all English rose and primrose, but turns out I’m half poisonous wolfsbane

I thought I knew where I came from, even if I didn’t feel like I belonged. The primrose comes from my birth mother’s side of the family, the Roses, with their British and Irish backgrounds. My dad’s family supposedly has similar roots. My DNA father’s family, however, comes from Abruzzo, Italy, where wolfsbane, a poisonous fall-blooming flower, grows. Wolfsbane is also known as Monkshood, as if to remind me that Dad will always be part of me despite our severed DNA.

What’s in a name? Roses (the flowers, not the family) and wolfsbane don’t care what humans call them. But for humans, our names represent our identity. I’ve had the name Tracey for 53 years now. My diplomas, government identification, academic articles, my children’s birth certificates, everything linked to me has the name Tracey on it. But since discovering my true DNA origins, Tracey feels even more removed from me than when I was young. I wonder if my name doesn’t feel like “me” because I still don’t feel right about who I am, or is this resurgence of the trouble with Tracey because Tracey is not a name given by Italian families? Will I one day come to be more accepting of myself, more at home in my body regardless of my name, or will I always have this sense of unbelonging in the world?

If it weren’t for all the ways my name is linked to my life, I might actually change my first name and officially add Ciccone to my last name. I’m not as brave as my eldest child who changed their first name to a chosen name that better suited their gender. The name we had given them, a female version of their dad’s grandfather’s name, became too feminine for their liking. As a young adult, the name didn’t fit who they felt like, so they changed it to something that did feel right to them. It was a brave thing for them to do and I respect them deeply for their decision. It took some getting used to, having called them a different name for over 22 years, but we did, gladly. It makes me proud of them and happy for them that they know who they are and can be comfortable being who they want to be in the world. I’m glad they haven’t followed my example in this area.

One good outcome of the UQTR name change mess, is that I can be better prepared should I fulfill my intention of moving (at least part time) to Italy upon retirement. Many countries, including Italy, have the same rule as Quebec –– official documents follow your birth certificate name. I will need to decide whether to go through the process of changing my birth certificate to avoid the trauma of being forced to carry around a name from my past that doesn’t feel like mine, in a place that otherwise feels like home, or coming to terms with it. I think an Italian last name would help me feel more a part of Italy, and I wonder whether it would help me integrate better into an Italian community. If I were to change my birth certificate, it would open up a whole new wound though, as I’d feel like I was erasing my dad, the man who is my father in all the important ways. It’s the name that doesn’t feel right to me, not the man behind it.

I’ve come to conclude that officially changing my first name would be more hassle than it’s worth, and perhaps a little like running away in my case, since my reasons for wanting the change are rooted in trauma. I don’t think I need to change my name to find my place in the world (unless I do end up residing in Italy and need to decide about my birth certificate name), that will come from more healing, healing I’ll need to do regardless of what I call myself.

Have you ever changed your name, or thought about changing your name – first or last? Whether for gender identity, cultural reasons, marriage, divorce, national or provincial bureaucracy, to keep your ‘real’ name away from your writing, or some other reason, I’m interested in your experience with names!