Who's That Girl?

I was at a wedding this weekend - yes, another one - for Close Friends Caesar and Nicole. Very Close Friends Matt and Michelle attended as well. For reference, Matt and Michelle were married about 6 months after Husband and I were.

During the course of conversation, Michelle mentioned that she sometimes accidentally still signed things with her maiden name, like writing last year's date for a month or two after the new year. We laughed about this, and she asked if it ever felt strange to me to use my married name.

Honestly, no. My maiden name seems absolutely foreign to me now. I'd been practicing signing my married name for months before the wedding. I reserved my married-name email address weeks early. As soon as we returned from our honeymoon, I started the process of sloughing off the maiden name: I had my legal name change and my new driver's license within a week; my financial records, insurance, and credit cards were changed as soon as I received my new DL; and my new passport and social security card were changed within a month. My car loan and one old 401k are the only things still in my maiden name, but I envision those as being an exceedingly difficult things to change paperwork-wise, so I keep dragging my feet. But I've got another year before I have to worry about what will go on the car title, and the 401k isn't going anywhere anytime soon... All right, all right I'll do it this year. But I digress.

I recently had to sign into the email account I had under my maiden name (firstnamemaidensurname), and it was genuinely awkward for me to type. My fingers tangled and I had to retype about three times before I got it right. I looked at my name on the screen, and it looked so strange. I sounded it out, and it seemed like I was saying someone else's name. I tried to sign it again and it came out all jerky and unnatural.

Funny that the name I wrote for 20 years and signed for 10 years seems so unfamiliar to me after only 2.