WOMEN IN ARMS by Kathryn Merrifield

WOMEN IN ARMS by Kathryn Merrifield

The phrase refers to women in combat – the combat nurse, the prude star of M*A*S*H mocked by her colleagues and crustily loved by the only other intellectual living on the base/set but who is far more delicate. 

Year 2016 is much different. 

What we have now is the allowance for women to participate in combat to the extent that men do.  Generations have taught us that women cannot participate in war.  Perhaps it has been to offset the draft that would steal mothers away from their children. 

According to the Military Times, “At its core, the decision means that as of Jan. 2, female service members — both current and incoming recruits — will be allowed to serve in any military job for which they meet the gender-neutral performance standards and other requirements.

"They'll be allowed to drive tanks, fire mortars, and lead infantry soldiers into combat. They'll be able to serve as Army Rangers and Green Berets, Navy SEALs, Marine Corps infantry, Air Force parajumpers and everything else that was previously open only to men," Carter said.

"And even more importantly, our military will be better able to harness the skills and perspectives that talented women have to offer."

Read the whole article at:  http://www.militarytimes.com/story/military/pentagon/2015/12/03/carter-telling-military-open-all-combat-jobs-women/76720656/

This was not part of my decision.  Interesting, however, is that it is implemented at a time when the draft is an inactive component of military recruitment.  It’s also at a time when my daughter is nine years old.  I find no reason that either of us should be in combat.

Oddly, and also in the news by curious synchronicity, is this:  stories about the comfort women of World War II.  Coincidence?  I think not:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/agreement-on-comfort-women-offers-ancillary-benefit-to-us-in-asia-pacific/2016/01/09/41a03d84-b54c-11e5-a842-0feb51d1d124_story.html

“After 70 years, the Japanese and South Korean governments finally released a joint statement outlining a bilateral agreement to settle the issue of comfort women, a euphemism for girls and women forced to have sex with Japanese soldiers from the 1930s until the end of World War WII.”

This started off as an idea – to smooth out international relations or what?  It started off as a funny riff on timing, something to joke about.*  Such a thing could make life easier for both male soldiers and women soldiers.  It could ruin marriages by providing for real relationships between men and women.  American soldiers too are charged with such international sexual abuses.  But perhaps allowing for both men and women to serve would block the necessity of the draft because ranks would be voluntarily filled drawing on both gender populations.

But when I I read more into it, learning that 200,000 women had been forced into slavery from 1930 to the end of World War II, raped and abused so that most could not live normal lives due to debilitating physical and emotional scars, the topic became less a funny riff on timing and moreso a statement as to how humane women are treated here in the US, despite repeated inhuman acts of brutality. And still there are acts of brutality despite American humanity – there are always exceptions and none go unnoticed.

Perhaps it’s a story of treating badly the people you love.  Treating badly your own for the greater good of a good face to the rest of the world, those you care less about – need to prove yourself to some other land, not your own.  Maybe it’s simply an act of war – brutalizing some for the sake of many.  Rape though?  Sexual slavery?

It happens here too.

Men were off for a rape event just this last weekend until everyone found out.  And when everyone found out… well, no rape event.

Maybe people just need to find out about these things.  Maybe everyone needs to be a hall monitor and bitch out just one person.  I don’t know if that’s capitalism or democracy or just crazy.  But it worked. 

Friends find out about each other and they stop anyone who will do them harm.

So in every good deed you’ve made a friend.  And friends are salve.

So, there’s that…

And there are friends who actually do this “tattle-taling” full-time because there are so many girls out there without rights or resources to have another life. 

Women who protect girls and women are my friends that I’m proud to have in my life. Women who build each other up amid whatever war is waged against them or around them.  These are the best of friends.

The same ones who just may understand why you’d also fight with such a decision based on open water swimming and the reason that you come to one day as to why you’ve decided that you will never open water swim with women again, because you’re afraid of blood sniffing sharks and how such sharks can be compared to ISIS and both make you afraid of anything that can sniff out a lady in heat.  Does that sound too disrespectful?  Will heavy artillery also provide tampon dispensers?  And, given the flawed design of tampons that come with plastic applicators with teeth (the way I came to the conclusion about open water swim company), I’m not sure I like the idea about women in war.  Maybe if the same people who invent astronaut food will also invent better tampon applicators and in theater feminine hygiene product dispensers, that may work. 

Either way, this isn’t an ad for friends but a case of mind wrapping in on itself on a Saturday morning – also to be called, “Operation Fuck That.”

I’ll always have my cat, “Tink.” 

(*This is what happens when I wake up at 3am EVERY MID-WINTER and try to organize m thoughts around being a better friend.)

HELLO, MY NAME IS.... by Kathryn Merrifield

Michael Ferrari at the AAA satellite office in Stamford, Connecticut, was the person who finally gave me the road map to a successful reversion to my maiden name.  My married name was Boccardi – still is hyphenated in some cases to ease the association (me being the mother of my three children) to included my maiden and married names.  My maiden name is Merrifield.  Unless your name is Smith or Jones, I can bet that anyone has had to correct the spelling of their name to someone butchering it.  Kathryn Jeanne Merrifield is a spelling nightmare, so I didn’t argue about the name change – the adoption of my husband’s name would mean simply that I’d be higher up in the alphabet and that I’d only have to correct my first and middle name – the first name correction often stumps people alone:  “a ‘k’ a ‘y’ and no ‘e’’ is my way of making light of it.  Or, ‘it’s only two syllables.”  No one famous or reputable spells their name the way mine is spelled.  Not that it bothers me as I think that adding another syllable to a name that only really requires two syllables and is less arrogant than “Katherine,” or “Catherine” (most Katherines or Catherines wind up going by “Kate” as if knowing full well that something is terribly wrong with taking up the value of life and breath to devote it to unnecessary syllables.  If Hemingway were alive, he’d probably agree with this, but Hemingway seems to have thought that extra words were like extra hims, and he edited both of them out which is why starting off short can be advantageous.  Though Kate isn’t an awful diminutive.  Kathy is, however, bad.  Lesson learned from my mother that I would never be a Kathy/Cathy – she taught me.

It was my first day of kindergarten.  My teacher, Mrs. Rodermell (who I had to call Mrs. Watermelon until I could recall her name), had all students wear a name badge that hung from a piece of yarn around each of our little kindergarten kid necks.  My badge read, “Kathryn” and on the opposite side of the little badge was the picture of an ice cream cone.  My mother stood behind me with both of her hands on my shoulders, a position that gave me the odd sense that she both had my back and was bracing me.  As a mother I think now that she was bracing herself - when my daughter went to kindergarten, I cried. 

“Hello, Kathy,” Mrs. Rodermell said.  In return, my mother said (I imagine smiling the way people do who know how to finesse any situation by nodding “yes” while saying “no” with her perfect Linda Carter as Wonder Woman smile– they looked exactly alike in the heyday of the network television series), “It’s Kathryn.”  Never again would somebody slip up and I rarely (less so now because I sound like an ass) pass off the very simplicity of it.  “Kate” wouldn’t have been so bad.  And the only time I let it go is when I’m a little scared of someone, or a little tired of correcting people for name slaying in what I can only name as a culture of lazy talk.

I have to say though, that it does make it easier to respect a name by hoping friends, acquaintances and business contacts will take a moment to get the correct spelling of a name.  It was once a sign of respect to spell a name.  People used to ask.  Perhaps the absence of writing – real cursive – the intimacy of pen to paper, the necessity to wait between sending and receiving or just receiving, has eliminated the respect of a name.  Everything must be here and now and right and uncorrectable.

Or perhaps people just hear what they want to hear.

Likely situation is that unique spellings are more than most people can handle.  To ask the correct spelling can seem invasive to someone who simply is too shy to ask, or too self consumed, or too busy, or too important in the way people see importance today as more gain and zero loyalty because of less human contact.  The front porch was once a form of communication.  A stroll around the neighborhood.  Letters.

Jeanne, is my middle name.  My mother chose the French spelling of her mother’s name, which is Jean.  It is pronounced Jean in English, but Johhhhn, in French (soft “J”).  No one got that part either.  But it’s a middle name so who cares?  And my grandmother didn’t fail to note that my mother spelled it wrong.

And then there’s “Merrifield”:  Katherine Mansfield, Mary Field, Field, Mary…  It was truncated and morphed every which way, so when I was married, changing my last name was somewhat of a relief.  Little did I know that everyone carries their own cross with a name.  My mother divorced and married her way out of and into a couple of last names, so I was determined to make my kids’ lives easier.  But we only know what we know, and when we’re young we have no idea what a name, motherhood, marriage, divorce, and identity all mean to a woman.  Parents always say that we’ll understand when we’re older.  We don’t understand until it comes true and the events that supposedly make us stronger, quietly kill the hope in ever after, and maybe a little louder bring us back to self.

(Pause before you continue.)

But it’s not as if my married name, “Boccardi,” was any easier.  If anything, what I thought would be easier, was far more difficult than I ever imagined it would be.  It’s a name that carried with it a sense of strange royalty among those who shared it.  It silenced me, because my husband needed to be quiet to maintain that name.  It put me in a role that I couldn’t live inside.  It forced me to keep the truth to myself and I hate to say it, but be a Boccardi. 

(I hate rum.)

Yes, I had to correct anyone who spelled that name incorrectly with, “No.  Not like the rum.  It’s B-O…”  During my divorce, I would joke that I needed to get the stench off me.  But then I think of my kids and it’s their name, while still needing to have myself back and shake it off.  That self that had also been discouraged to have a voice, but the self that finally had one.  The self with a name everyone will always misspell came back with absolutely zero fanfare or acknowledgment, which is sort of why I like it.  It’s just a name, but it’s mine and it’s me.

Michael Ferrari of the Stamford AAA office said that he’d advise his daughter, if she ever married, not to change her name to her husband’s.  He said that he felt so bad for these women who get divorced – what they had to go through to change back to their maiden names (as if the promise of being a maiden would be impetus enough to withstand the insidious and murky paper trail required).

What Michael Ferrari did was gently direct me to the Social Security office in Stamford, where I was able to finally start the process of changing my name.  I’ve been divorced for a year, and the hurdle that prevented me from starting was my car lease, financed from the same institution where I’d kept my money since moving to New York eighteen years ago.  The bank couldn’t change my name to the maiden name I had on file without the driver’s license, but I couldn’t change my driver’s license without confirmation that the bank acknowledged my name change. 

All documents needed for a name change:

Settlement agreement;

Notarized document from the court stating what your name change will be if the greedy crapshoot of an attorney didn’t specify it in the settlement document (no, I am not Cheryl Strayed);

If you don’t have the name change specified, then you have to request that the court provide a document specifying the name change – a form must be filled out, submitted with a birth certificate (mine was still partly burned from the fire that occurred in my dad’s garage in California, and where all eleven boxes containing my belongings was stored until I had a place to put all of it in New York).  Once this document from the court is received, and you order another birth certificate from the Department of Health and Human Services because the court decided to keep the one you provided, the name change has to be published in a newspaper of the court’s choice.

Once all of that is done, and you’ve spent a few ten to twenty minute sessions on the phone yelling at the bank who finally becomes convinced that, yes, you were unmarried at the time of opening a bank account and that perhaps they can cross-check my bank accounts for my maiden name and therefore change it to my maiden name using this information, it is possible to change the social security information.

In the meantime, there’s Michael Ferrari. 

After the social security card is received, I was finally able to go to the court with the Affidavit from the Journal News and a court document specifying my name change to get a new driver’s license.  To further complicate matters, I was also registering my leased car in the state of Connecticut (from New York), so after presenting all documents, I had to return to the Department of Motor Vehicles in Norwalk to change the registration after getting a VIN inspection and telling Geico that given my address change I was also supposed to receive a State of Connecticut insurance card, to present for the altered state of registration.

After all of that, I was able to get a new passport, using the driver’s license to substantiate my identity.  Now I’m simply left to worry that travel situations out of the country will flag Homeland Security who’ll assume I’m exporting and stealing my own children – we are no longer affiliated by name.  Joy.

Mostly now I just feel that the gag order has been lifted and I can start healing.  Friends closest to me get it but very few understand.  Most know that I’m a California girl who loves what the northeast provides for her heart and mind.  “Merrifield” to me means complexity and hurt, life hard-won and huge gains and losses.  My name is my life.  It’s what I live with every day.  It’s my cross and I don’t want anyone else’s.  What I want is what made me, me, as messed up and damaged as I feel some days, as confused and lost and jaded, as hopeful and happy and calm, as anxious and angry and sad – no matter what - it’s one thing no one can take away from me, not in that way that it was removed and not in the way that it allowed me to reject myself.  It’s the only thing that’s truly mine.

So, hello…