Why I Am
On the subject of surnames. (Mostly mine, but maybe yours, too, if we share one.)
I always knew I would change my name someday. I just didn’t know why, nor to what. I suspected it would not be for the reason most women change their names, which is because our names—and, still to this day, our identities, to some degree—are meant to change hands from our fathers to our husbands. In my case, I changed my name because it, and my identity, was changing hands from my father’s to my own.
In the late 50s, my father was born and, within his first year, adopted by a family he became estranged from as I was growing up. Decades later, I had found myself estranged from him, and then we were both stuck with surnames that meant nothing to us from a filial or familial perspective.
As a child, if I wanted to avoid a conversation with him about how I’d fucked up that day at school, or if he wanted to avoid a conversation with me about how it was fine for me to attend some field trip or watch some controversial video, I thought nothing of forging his signature—which was very easy to forge because our last name contained only three letters. Eventually, I simply adopted his signature as my own, and it became my legal scrawl for over a decade into my adult life: my first driver’s licenses, my first lease, my first car.
Even before our estrangement, my last name at birth followed me around like an animal hunting its prey. It literally was the name of an animal, which humiliated me growing up. As a teenager, I Googled myself to discover my name was nearly identical to the stage name used by a Toronto-area escort, which was likewise humiliating. I longed to change it, and specifically to extricate myself from the original family who imposed it upon us: the people who had so failed to love my father that he was rendered incapable of fully loving himself.
My first opportunity to change my surname came when I was married for the first time. And yet, even though I was being offered a surname with a rich history in every sense of the word, I couldn’t accept it. I just couldn’t take my husband’s name, even if it belonged to our child, too. I felt like I would be abandoning my father, leaving him and his name to the wayside with the people who gave it to us just because, really, they had to. More to the point, I was convinced that being Mrs. Somebody, to some degree, meant no longer being somebody of your own. (I still kind of am, even if I respect all the Mrs. Somebodies in the world who disagree.)
So I let my name stay ugly for the sake of staying my own.
When my father and I became estranged, we were, thousands of miles away and never to speak to each other again, burdened with names belonging to people we no longer belonged to. I cursed my hand every time it wrote his signature. I would’ve rather been called nothing than ever be called by his name again.
Estoy a. Estoya. Estoya.
My mom’s surname, by contrast, was like a beautiful family heirloom that we needed to tuck away in the closet because it was of no use to us anymore but was too precious and sentimental to sell. Estoya. I had roughly a dozen cousins and four uncles at various points who got to continue enjoying being themselves, yet my mother and her sister had to abdicate their thrones by virtue of femininity.
My first husband was, and still is, a big family history buff—and he got me into the hobby during our dating years, too. His own family history, bustling with landowners and farmers and nobility, was easy to trace and replete with vital records and written accounts of people’s lives. I, on the other hand, was born into a smattering of Holocaust survivors and Filipinos trapped under the first Ferdinand Marcos. Sometimes we’d joke that our child is the product of the world’s most and least oppressed people on the planet, except it’s not really a joke and she actually kinda is.
The first branch to climb up a family tree is the mother’s maiden name. Coincidentally, it’s often also the first way to commit a variety of white collar crimes, but I trusted my then-boyfriend to care more about my family history than my then-mediocre credit score. He plugged “Estoya” into one of those surname decoders that tells you the nationality of everyone with that surname. “Estoya” being an obvious portmanteau of the Spanish “estoy a,” we expected to climb a colonial ladder up the Philippines and eventually into Spain.
Instead, to our surprise, we found that “Estoya” is an almost strictly Filipino surname. There were a few Estoyas in the United States, the United Arab Emirates, and Singapore, but these were almost certainly overseas Filipino workers (OFWs) working to send their loved ones remittance from the diaspora. Why would a name that translates to “I am” in Spanish be exclusive to one of their numerous colonies? Why were there no Latin American, Central American or, hell, even North American Estoyas—except a handful of balikbayans*?
Then it occurred to us: what if the first Estoya was approached by a census-taker and, attempting to speak back in broken Spanish, all they could muster out was, “Estoy a… estoy a…”
And, for the Spanish, that was good enough for them, that we simply existed on what was now their property.
A decade later, realizing I needed to reclaim my identity for myself to make sense of my estrangement from my father, I filed papers with the state to formally and permanently change my name to Erica Dee Estoya. The beautiful family heirloom would now become my own. I paid the courts a fee and showed up on my summons date, both entirely of my own volition. Despite this, it still felt like a criminal act, y’know, talking to a judge and everything.
Yet when I left court that day, I was no criminal, nor was I anyone’s property. I belonged not to my father nor to his, nor to the Spanish who gave my family its name hundreds of years ago. I simply was, with this name inextricable and woven into my being, like forever-stitches meant to keep scars from opening up old wounds.
I breathed deeply the clear May air, looked up at the bluest sky I’d seen in years, and drove home.
Now, every time I write my name, I am, and I am sure of it.
* Balikbayan: OFWs who go to and from the islands, often bringing gifts in a balikbayan box.