I carry my mother in my surname. Culture has buried it over the years, as I go by just my father's surname rather than my full hyphenated last name for the convenience of it. It's simpler, it always has been. And bureaucracy has along the way reduced my proud and complicated last name to a single one, removed the hyphenation and made my mother's name a second middle name.

But it's still my name. It will always be my true name. I've always like being able to trace my history in my name.

I've always been sad that we don't have a true matrilineal name -- one that passes down from mother to daughter without being the mother's name given to her by her father. As though women were no more than their father's daughter, as if the history they carry is interrupted with each generation, as if the father's history is still the one in the end that truly matters.

I've never decided what to do about it for my own children. I won't inflict on my children the hyphenated monstrosity that combining my surname and my husband's surname would be. They can have his surname. But I do want their names to carry their mother in them somewhere too, so they have that history.

As a note, it's not just me that thinks boys should have that history too. My husband's middle name is his mother's first surname.