For a while, I tossed around the idea of changing my name.

But I hate taking up space, and I hate making a fuss. So I tried small things, like abbreviating my first name, throwing my middle name in e-mail signatures, and hyphenating my married name into the picture.

It scratched an itch, but the itch was still there.

I also hate the feeling that I owe an explanation for myself—especially for such a personal choice. It feels sort of like coming out again, an altogether exhausting process. Once in your life should be enough, shouldn’t it? The bottled-up worry of reactions, the explanations owed for something so personal, the judgment—both real and imagined. 

And yet. 

In the fall of 2024, Juan and I went to see Nye, a play about the life of Aneurin Bevan, a Welshman who grew up in the coalfields and went on to become the father of the NHS, the National Health Service, across the UK. 

It was a phenomenal play, interspersing stories from Bevan’s childhood and the deprivation he witnessed with the heights of his later political career—one of the only men who dared hold Winston Churchill to account during World War II, and tireless in his battle for healthcare free at the point of contact. He was a tremendously brave man, and Michael Sheen’s characterisation of him superb. 

The play left me thinking of how, in some way, each generation tries to build on the one that came before it—striving for betterment, whether it’s creating a more secure financial situation for our children, seeking out new educational opportunities, or healing from generational traumas. Never arriving, but always striving. 

And in some small way, that’s what me returning to Wales has been all about. Reconnecting with, reclaiming, some part of the past that we’ve lost—that I think we need. A coming home to ourselves, literally and figuratively, now that the winds that drove our ancestors over the Atlantic have shifted the other way around. 

So, I’m going by Meredith now—Meredith ap Robert.

In its anglicised form, Meredith is a bit flat. Two syllables. Easy. In Welsh, it’s three, with the emphasis on the penultimate syllable: mah-red-deth. A challenge for the Upper Midwesterners among us. But doable. At some point, I might change it to Welsh orthography, but for now, an extra syllable will do. 

In the old Welsh tradition, it means Meredith son of Robert. It’s a change, yes, but the pieces have been there all along: the family name that comes from the in-between Marches on the Welsh border with England, and my father’s name—and his father’s name—which sat in the silent middle between my first and last names all these years. 

This is my space. This is my voice. 

I don’t know where I’m going, but I know where I’m from.