What's in a name?

I am going to change my name, I have been known as Sally Coleman for forty three years now, and yet divorced from the man whose name I took for the last twelve years. It’s time, I will again be known as Sally Richardson a name I had for 20 years, the name I was given at birth, my dad’s name. I wasn’t ready to change it twelve years ago, I tried and began but stopped, but now I am ready.

Names are important, I know that, and that is possibly why I hesitated for so long, my children all had the name Coleman twelve years ago, it mattered then, now not so much, and two of them don’t have that name any longer anyway, but now I don’t need that link with them, they won’t stop being my children and I won’t stop being their mum/ grandma. So, at last I am doing this for me.

I’m not really doing it to reclaim a sense of my family, because that was complicated enough on its own, my dad was an alcoholic, and my parents divorced when I was 13, mum remarried and took her new husbands name, I was offered the chance to do the same but refused. I think if anything I am doing it to rid myself of the shame I have been carrying for so long, don’t get me wrong, I know a name change won’t do that, but it will be a sign of healing, a sign of coming to terms with some difficult stuff, and a sign that I am reclaiming a sense of self that I had buried for too long, always bending and twisting to become what I thought others wanted. I am claiming myself back and simply saying no more of this!

It will also coincide with a change of appointments in the Methodist Church, when I move it will be as Reverend Sally Richardson, not Coleman, given that the whole of my time as a minister in the Methodist Church has been conducted under the cloud of divorce and the knowledge that my ex-husband and his now wife both also Methodist Ministers are still linked to me by name, it is definitely time for a change. Add to that the discomfort I have experienced in this current appointment a new start feels the right thing.

So what’s in a name, nothing and everything, so today I filled in the form, and today I start to reclaim myself

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