After much discussion and thought, my partner Sally and I decided to give our kids her last name rather than mine. We had pragmatic reasons for doing it, and we knew full well that we were breaking with patriarchal tradition, but we were caught by surprise by the consternation of my feminist mom.

When Sally was pregnant for the first time, we made every effort not to find out the gender of the baby until after s/he was born. Following the Jewish tradition of Sally’s family, we decided to pick a first name with the first letter of the person no longer alive that we wanted to honor. In this circumstance we decided that that person would by my father, Eric Zale, who had died in 1984, just after Sally and I married and two years before Eric’s first grandchild would be born. Continue reading →