I'm going mssing for a while

Increasingly, I’m having these telephone conversations clearing up the fact that I don’t share a surname with the person to whom I am married. I don’t mind doing so; I realise mine is not the default set-up, although it is hardly rare. “So what is your correct name?” I will be asked. “The Goldfish.” “Is that Miss or Mrs?” “Um, Ms please, M S.” Then follows a short silence as this is written down or typed in, during which there is an immense temptation to say, “Yes, I’m sorry about that. I’m afraid I am a bit of a bitch.” I don’t like being a bitch. Don’t have any pride in it. I have never liked being a Ms, only it is infinitely preferable to Mrs or Miss. I don’t like causing anybody any inconvenience, or contradicting people’s assumptions. I don’t care if businesses or individuals I don’t know address me as Mrs AJ’s Surname – I only cause a fuss when, for example, Mrs AJ’s Surname is being charged a thousand pounds in tax that Ms Goldfish is exempt from. I can be unreasonable like that. The Ms thing started with a children’s book. It was the very first book I bought with my own money, through a book club at school. You could save up stamps, a few pence at a time and eventually buy a book. The book I bought was called Ms Wiz Spells Trouble by Terence Blacker. Ms Wiz was a schoolteacher who could do magic and the first female fictional character who I truly admired. I don’t have the book any more and I can’t quite remember quite how it went, but one of the children asked why she was called Ms and she explained that she was much too grown up to be called Miss and yet had absoluetly no intention of gettting married. I'm sure it was slightly more powerful than that, as at the tender age of sevenish, I knew I too would address myself as Ms when I grew up. At the same time, it was becoming more commonplace to have both married and unmarried teachers who addressed themselves as Ms and when I reached sixteen and got to deal with my own paperwork, I became Ms Goldfish. It was quite obvious to me that this was what all the women of my generation would do. It doesn’t matter to me that they don’t. It doesn’t matter that many women my age are taking their husband’s surnames. It's a personal choice and really rather trivial in the greater scheme of things. This entirely post is extremely trivial in the greater scheme of things but I'm probably over half way through already. However, it does bug me that other women seem to care about my choices. I knew an office team, a group of female colleagues who would have a snigger and whisper “Ms Bitch!” every time they had correspondence or conversation with someone who addressed themselves Ms. Women, who know my name and don’t really need to entitle me at all, insist on addressing correspondence to Miss Goldfish or Mrs AJ’s Surname. Women who call themselves Ms have a bee in their bonnet you see, and therefore, apparently, are undeserving of respect. Buzz. Truth be told, differentiation between unmarried and married women in English only started in the 19th century. Previously, Mistress was used as the default term of respect to adult women, like Mister was and is for adult men, and Miss was the diminutive, only used for female children, as Master was and is used for boys too young to be called Mr. So we are not rewriting too ancient a rule in our language too much to reject this system. Yet if I do use Mrs Goldfish, well folks will assume I am married to someone other than the man I live with. Perhaps I should try the full Mistress. When we married, we did consider rejecting both our patronymic surnames altogether and calling ourselves Mister and Mistress Ploppy... It does seem slightly odd that it is women who seem so invested in this stuff, that it is always women who have defied or challenged my choices. I guess some men have strong feelings about what they would like the women they might marry to do, but they have no particular investment in the choices of other women. My Dad makes a fuss of course, but then I have effectively condemned him to a lifelong nominal association with me. He can't marry out of it like I could. I guess this relates to what Sage was writing about the other day, about being condemned by other women for doing whatever she feels like. Many women, it seems, really wish there wasn't a choice about this stuff. But there is; a completely free choice. If you recognise this choice, along with all the other choices you have in life, you probably made the right one for yourself. If you don't and think I don't deserve a choice either, then it's quite possible you got it wrong.