When to let your hyphen go

I should be cleaning my kitchen. Half a pound of beautifully marinated, fresh off the grill, wild sockeye salmon sits on the counter waiting, along with the remains of an avocado salad and a smooth but tangy french goat cheese, for its respective tupperware. But this inclination has come on me like a force, and I must commit it to the mythological internets now.

I am thinking of dropping my hyphen. Which would make me Sarah Ross Viles. Or, with middle initial, Sarah A. Ross Viles. I think I would still be Sarah RV, but perhaps Sarah R V?

I was not born with a hyphen. I was born Sarah Viles to parents Nancy Ross and George Viles. Technically, I was a bastard at the time of my birth, the younger of two bastards in fact. However, to my mother, I am pretty sure that joint property ownership, not to mention the creation of joint genetic material, constituted a bond more stable than law. My dad is my mother's second husband. She was divorced from the first before she was the age I am now. My parents were eventually married a few months after my birth (by my grandfather) with both myself and the other bastard in attendance. Their names remained Nancy Ross and George Viles.

When I started school I became alert to the shocking coincidences that all my friends' parents seemed to have the same last name. Weird. By third grade I had figured out the whoel name changing thing and decided to honor my mother I started on the hyphen path, writing "Ross-Viles" on all the official papers that are thrust the way of a third grader. I had to legally change to Ross-Viles in my senior year of high school so the colleges I was applying to wouldn't accuse me of SAT fraud. $40.00, a breif appearance in a Maine state court and voila, hyphee for life!

I hate the hyphen. It is not a character that I would choose to be a part of my name. It is not a period, or a graceful space, but an arm thrust into a gap. "Wait, I'm not done yet," like someone miming to the person holding their hair back when they puke that there is more to come. OK, not that I think my last name is puke, but I really don't like the hyphen.

And who are we accursed of the hyphen? Until some generations ago it was only brazen women who retained their filial identity into their marriage. A lot of gender disempowerment passes me by. But being slapped with a hyphen as punishment for keeping a maiden name? I guess you could see it as the whale bone slipped out of the corset we refused to wear in the old country and into our enlightened feminist lives. Now parents are giving their kids the hyphen. And I for one, draw conclusions about it.

For instanace:

"Ross-Viles" makes me think: stuffy, perhaps argumentative, self-righteous in a boring way

"Ross Viles" makes me think: mysterious, glamorous, inviting

The hyphen is the Scarlet Punctuation.

So I am phasing it out, much like I phased it in in the late '80's. And immediate benefit is that I won't have to wrastle all the online forms that don't allow hyphens as a character. Long term benefits, I am thinking that once my name is free from the shackles of sexism masked as feminism, I will have bouncier hair, whiter teeth, and probably a spring in my step as well. So if I look and act different, you'll know why.

Stalkers Never Die, They Just Get Invisible and Inside Your Head

I would say that until about a year ago the only recurrent trauma I had in my life was in the form dreams. I had two specific recurring dreams when I was a kid one of which was about disembodied hands coming out of the woods behind my house (no more watching The Munsters for me) and the other of which was crazy with archtypal meaning. In the latter, I would be driving my friend Rachel's family's Volkswagen Rabbit on an unfmailiar stretch of our road. The car would be filled with sentient, wriggling skeletons -- so many that I would have to brush their bony limbs away to see out the windsheild, who were all desperately trying to get somewhere that they couldn't communicate with me. As a kid I hated skeletons, but in this dream I had compassion towards them. I think it amounted to something like, "It must suck to be a skeleton, the least I can do is get them out of this Rabbit to where they are going." Which brings me to Archtype Theme Number 1- Compassion for the Other. Archtype Theme Number 2 was Having to Assume the Role of the Parent while Dealing with the Loss of a Parent. This theme was portrayed in the fact that 7, 8, or 9 year old me was driving the car, when obviously that should be a parent's job, but driving the car was taking so much of my concentration I didn't really have time to think about where the parent was. This apsect of the dream was very similar to another slightly less recurrent dream in which our road had turned into African wildlands (no more Miami Zoo safari ride for me) and my mother had her foot bitten off by a lion. Since she couldn't drive the car without a foot, I had to drive to the hospital along unfamiliar Africa road (I got into the anxiety dreams at a young age).

The thing about a recurrent dream is it conditions you. When I would first have the Volkswagen Full Of Skeletons dream it would be a long affair, full of lucid decisions about where to turn and what to say to the anxious skeletons, and blooming with details like wind rustling leaves off a tree to allow a gap of moonlight through the Rabbit's sunroof and into one of my companion's empty eye sockets. After three or four times though, the dream was more like a movie still thrown up on my brainpan while my subconscious loaded the next reel. However, just the snap image of the german-made car with its desperate macabre load shoved me into terror. I don't remember when I stopped having recurrent kid nightmares. Maybe I hit a point where I was no longer afraid to try to communicate with beings who were different than me, or realised I would be able to survive without my parents. I obviously had them long enough that I remember them with quite a lot of detail, but I can't remember the last time they occured.

Whatever part of my brain that was responsible for the Pavlovian terror reaction to any somnolent suggestion of those dreams has recently dusted off its mechanism and gotten back to work. Only now, it is not triggered by dream images, but by single stimulations in reality that mimic memories from the three nights last year when some guy tried to break into my SWF apartment. The whole stalker thing struck deeper than I would have guessed, as someone who likes to joke about uncomfortable things until laughter jogs them enough in their sockets that I am able to knock them free.

A week ago I woke up at 2 in the morning after only a half hour of half sleep to a voice outside my cracked open window. I now live on the third floor, and my windows are 5 feet off the ground, but there is a catwalk that runs along the bedroom side of my apartment. A man was on this catwalk either trying to rouse someone in particular or just to see what reaction he could get. It was a Saturday night, so it was comepletely possible that drunky catwalker was just on his way out of a friend's apartment. Pre-stalker me would have gone back to sleep. I lay in bed, frozen in worry that any creek of my bedsprings would draw the person to me and he would accomplish whatever the mysterious evil last year's guy failed to compete. Simultaeneously, I was pulled from the bed by the worry that I had forgotten to lock the door, depsite the fact that I was sure I locked the door. Eventually, when it sounded like the man had moved down the walk, I stealthed out of bed and affirmed the deadbolt in its fully locked position, Then I cuddled my phone in bed, ready to dial 911 until I fell back asleep.

Yes, you are thinking, I have flipped. Understandably so, but flipped all the same. I think I am doing alright if I am keeping the flipping to 2 AM in the morning. And actually, there was a whole self-sufficient upshot to the experience as i realized later that my instinct had not been to call an ex-boyfriend, as it had been a year ago, but to call actual law enforcement and emergency responders. Yay!

But then there was tonight. I got home from a jog around 8:30 and set up to cooking one of those huge pasta dishes that can sustain the one bedroom apartment dweller for days. Everything was minutes away from done, and perfect timing too with the sun just set, when an irregular knowck bounced against my door. I was not expecting anybody and ruled out a surprise visit from a friend as the knock was aggressive and irregular, really the knock of someone who didn't know me at all, i thought. I ignored it, thinking maybe I was mistaken and it was a knock next door, but it went on and I worried that the person might just come in so I better face them head on. I went to the peephole and saw nothing. I opened the door and saw nothing. I stood there, peering into grey, trying to figure out which direction the attack would come from. Something tugged my shirt. A little girl in pick stood up to my waste in front of me, holding in one hand the other fist that must have been raw, at this point, from knocking. "Hi" I said. She pointed past me and turning around I saw a paper cone of flowers hanging on my doorknob. "Oh! A maybasket! Thank you!" "Read it," she said. "Happy May Day," I read, "Thank you." And she ran away to her dad, my apartment manager, sho stood 20 yards away at the top of the stairs shrugging. Wow.

I am thinking I will wedge this improvised vase into my brain's paranoid machinery and see if it can at least slow it down.

Happy May Day!