The cost of reclaiming your maiden name

After easily taking her ex-husband’s last name, divorcee Kathy Young learned just how hard it is to get your own name back.

My ex-husband was a military man, with military parents, so when we got married 21 years ago it felt like a tradition I was willing to uphold. I was “all in”, so why wouldn’t I show that by sharing the surname of my beloved? We also knew we wanted to have kids, so it just made sense.

Plus, back then, aged 29, I was still pained by my maiden name. At school, my name was called last on the register. For my ballet exams I had that gnawing sense the examiners had run out of attention by the time they watched me.

Despite this, it did cross my mind to keep my maiden name. I’d been to university, socialised with feminists and politics students, and I knew some of the struggles that women had been through to get their rights as women recognised.

But on balance, I was ready to give up Young in exchange for a new name, one closer to the beginning of the alphabet. The thought of never again being last, alphabetically, appealed. I was immature and it felt important.

By 2019, my marriage had ended. We divided the furniture, navigated the lawyers and separated the photographs. But there was something stirring in me now. Yes, I was lamenting the break up of the family but the mud was receding. I wanted my birth name back.

In the time between marrying and divorcing I’d lost both parents to cancer, and I wanted to honour their name and reclaim Young. My dad – a hobby carpenter – used to make woodwork around the Y shape, and he even named his hobby yacht Why. I wanted to re-belong to the Y camp.

Empowered and emboldened I talked to my sons about it, who were seven and 10 at the time. They were of the opinion that it would “break up the family”, which was sort of true, by default of getting divorced. So I gritted my teeth and kept the name for a few more years.

But when my ex-husband remarried in 2023, things got weird. There could be a new wife walking around town with the same surname. I thought about both wives’ names appearing on the children’s sports apps. I wondered if the new wife would crop up on the school’s emergency contacts. A friend told me that when her ex-husband remarried, her GP’s office addressed her by the new wife’s first name, and reminded her that she had an overdue bill. It’s a strange kind of feeling that lands somewhere between awkwardness and damn right vomit-inducing.

It was a simple turning point, but for me, an air of invisibility had entered. I felt like a ghost in a house that had been redecorated. So it was time to change.

Because of who I am, I started with a list. Seventy, yes, 7-0, lines later, I was still going. And that’s not including all the rubbish accounts we sign up for: store loyalty cards, e-newsletters and so on.

Most banks followed a standard pattern: “Bring your birth certificate, your marriage certificate and your dissolution of marriage order into the branch, and we’ll make the change, in person,” they said.

The dissolution of marriage order costs $242. I split that 50/50 with my ex. The marriage certificate (issued in the UK, and a peculiar size – bigger than A4, smaller than A3) wouldn’t fit in the banks’ photocopiers, and they couldn’t work out what to do. I got used to telling them to use the percentage reduction function, and we mostly got there.

Then more costs started to appear. The driver’s licence change: $46.10. The New Zealand passport was $180; the UK one, $230. And I’m not including the cost of photocopying documents, posting stuff and getting certified copies from the retired Justice of the Peace, who had the appearance of being preoccupied with “far more important matters”.

Each institution had its own process, its own forms, its own timelines, and often its own fee. IRD. Electoral roll. Car insurance. The GP. The dentist. The children’s school. And each of these required me to initiate it. There’s no central system that ripples outwards. No government portal, that I’m aware of, allows you to enter your new name and watch the bureaucracy update itself like a satisfying row of falling dominoes. Was it this hard when I got into the marriage? No way. Back then I was in love, of course, so I didn’t mind the admin. A quick search today tells me a marriage certificate in New Zealand costs $33. And that includes postage.

The worst was the local council. They refused to change my name on my rates bills until I changed my name on the title deed of my house. I first had to engage a lawyer to go through the rigmarole of updating the LINZ records. I could have done it myself, apparently, but by this point I was carrying enough of the mental load without adding a law degree to it. The lawyer charged me $425.50 for the pleasure.

I then strutted back to the council, clutching the new title deed and said, “Ta-daa! Please change it now”. And they said, “Oh, well, we can’t actually change it on our system. It’s an IT thing.” I thanked the representative, took a deep breath, and left with my redundant title deed. After further phone calls they found a work-around, but on their system it’s still my old name.

There’s a monetary cost to changing your name. There’s a time cost, too. But for me, the biggest cost lay in the exhaustion. Finding the energy to go to all these places, stand in queues, fill out forms, wait some more, phone the 0800 numbers, all the while maintaining my writing business, doing the laundry, making school lunches, attending to my guilt, re-establishing my identity and being kind.

I know one woman who just didn’t bother. The process was too lengthy on top of everything else a divorce involves. It’s not laziness, it’s depletion.

But somewhere in the wreckage of paperwork, something shifted in me. This was about restoration, redemption, but mostly freedom. Freedom to be in a place where I belonged. I hadn’t expected joy to show up along the way. Like seeing my maiden name on a byline or that feeling of being a kid again when they called my full name at the medical centre.

After the better part of a year of admin I’m home now, unmistakably me. Back at the end of the alphabet, and perfectly happy to be last.