A funny thing about getting divorced is that you're allowed to change back to your pre-married name for free, but you have to go through a whole (expensive) process to change it to anything else.

I had lots of reasons for taking my then-husband's surname when I was 22, and all those reasons stand as I approach my 41st birthday. I've done a legal name change before: when I was in college, it was vitally important to me to change my middle name (my mother's birth surname) to something phonologically-neutral that I could go by as a first name when I lived all over the world, as I planned to do after colllege. One thing you learn when you're a nonbinary language nerd named Quinn is that, however fond you are of your given name in English, it sucks for linguistic cross-compatibility if you don't like being called whatever the local rendering is of the English word "Queen". Which I very much do not.

So in college, I took the middle name "Anna", which is how I've ended up with the online handle quinnanya ever since. "Anya" a Slavic diminuitive I'm fond of, which works almost as well as "Anna" cross-linguistically. As a fallback, though, "Anna" is pretty iron-clad. That said, I have to credit UChicago Russian lecturer Valentina Pichugin with that name. It was her idea, after Anna Akhmatova, and seemed good enough to me at the time. Even though I got married and stayed in the US (and in academia) instead of living all over the world, I've made it a home of sorts.

Right after I got divorced, I thought I'd keep my ex's surname, Dombrowski. I had made it mine. I had gone by that name professionally all these years. I'd published extensively under it. It was the same last name my kids had. Why should I have to give it up?

But as time went on, it grated on me more and more. It's always felt too long. Twice the number of characters of my original last name; 1.5x the number of syllables. And it was too much a reminder of that life. That said, I didn't want to mess up my work email, qad, and I'd used "Quinn D" in various contexts as well. So as I started looking, I started with the letter D for convenience. And I happened to find exactly what I needed.

Daedal, like Daedalus. My work has taken a turn towards craft in the last handful of years, and what a wonderful and messy and complicated figure to aspire towards. (Also, shout-out to Maria Cecire for her excellent recommendation of Madeline Miller's Circe, where Daedalus is a significant secondary character, and weaving shows up in a significant way.)

I started the paperwork process in November, but various life things got in the way. It's finally been accepted by the local court, and the wheels are turning on getting the legal name change done. I've told my kids, and explained that even though I could have theoretically gotten them a surname change for the same price, I wasn't up for the fight that would've been involved, and besides, I want them to make their own choice. I've offered to pay for one name change (of any/all parts of their name, to whatever they want!) for each kid once they're a legal adult. Thanks to Rick Riordan, the oldest kid immediately made the connection to Daedalus.

Happily, we've got tools for managing this kind of thing on the data side. I've updated my ORCID. I'll work on getting other authority records sorted out; it helps, working with librarians.

I get giddy seeing it. I love practicing signing it. The first friend I told about it immediately changed her phone contact entry for me, and I nearly cried seeing the screenshot she sent me. I feel like I get in my bones whatever my own flavor of (gender-adjacent) euphoria is -- a name I chose, myself, for me.