Hyphenate

Hyphenate

I make breakfast

eggs and toast

soft–scrambled

jam–buttered

you make tea

kettle boiled

in big mugs

milk- stirred

across the table

we search for

evidence of

our selves

our stories

our names unified

inseparable–individual.

When I was first married, I played with the idea of hyphenating my last name with my husband’s, part of me liked the idea of being traditional, to just go ahead and change my name altogether. Somehow, that didn’t quite fit with my sense of self.

I tried the the hyphenated version for a bit. Sweet-Charbonneau. Sounds like some sort of dessert or ice wine.

For me, at least, there was this level of pressure that washed over me when I became a wife. What expectations, traditions, jobs were connected to this?

Giving up my last name somehow meant giving up my self- my identity. It meant I was giving up being a feminist and giving in to a world ruled by my husband. He, of course, never placed any of these expectations upon my shoulders, and in fact, as the years of our marriage have gone by, we have fused into a strong team, with support, encouragement, and honour of one another as individuals on both sides. No, those pressures were my own, because I wasn’t sure how to balance all the women I wanted to be.

Eventually, I figured out how to just be me. This poem is a reflection on my early days of marriage as I tried to find myself within a union of two