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.