Holding Treu

Coming home to the name that’s always been mine

For the last few years, a small voice has been tugging at my heart.

It started as a whisper—easy to brush off, easy to explain away. But the older I get, the more healing I do, the more I root into myself … the louder that voice has become.

It says: You gave away a part of yourself, Beautiful. You didn’t know you were, it wasn’t your intention, but you did it nonetheless. And now it’s time to take it back.

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I changed my last name when I got married.

I know. Shocker.

It felt normal. Expected. I relished the idea of being a Mrs. I loved the “traditional” way that formal invitations were sent out as “Mr. and Mrs. [Husband’s First and Last Name].” So romantic.

I didn’t think too hard about it, honestly. Everyone around me was doing it. It felt right at the time. And in the years since, there hasn’t been a lightning-bolt moment of doubt—just a slow, quiet erasure that I only started to notice in hindsight.

Well, maybe someone noticed.

At the time I got married, I was teaching in a Montessori preschool, surrounded by a classroom full of curious, openhearted, very literal little beings. My wedding was scheduled over winter break, and on the last day before the holiday, I sat them all down during circle time.

With a glowy, “my wedding day is almost here!” smile on my face, I told them, “When we come back together in the new year, I’ll be Mrs. Brunetti!”

One of the boys immediately burst into tears.

Real tears. Big, hot, four-year-old heartbreak tears. He was devastated—because he thought Ms. Treusdell, the teacher he knew and loved, was going away forever.

I rushed to reassure him: “No, no, I’m still me! I’ll always be me—I’m just changing my name.”

But the thing is … he wasn’t wrong. Overnight, I was going to ask everyone in my life to call me by a different name. Anyone I met in the future would only know me as a Brunetti, not as a Treusdell.

I had to learn how to sign my name all over again.

At first, it was exciting. I got a little thrill every time I introduced myself. What a lovely way to show the world that Joe and I were truly connected.

Now, after years of doing some deep, sometimes scary work—of calming my nervous system, of surrounding myself with people who see and celebrate the full spectrum of who I am, of reconciling my past and recognizing that we all love to the best of our ability, with the experiences and resources we have at the time—I’ve realized something simple and true:

I miss my name.

And I want it back.

Not legally—at least, not yet—but creatively.

So here, on TreuWords, and in future publications, I’m writing under the name I was born with: Treusdell.

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Recently, I visited Scotland, where part of my family comes from. I found myself wandering through old graveyards (a favorite pastime of mine), reading the names on headstones and monuments and wondering about the lives behind them. What did they eat for breakfast? What made them laugh? Who broke their hearts?

What struck me, again and again, was this: the women’s names hadn’t changed. They were buried under the names they were born with.

An old gravestone from 1842 commemorating Thomas Arrol, a merchant from Edinburgh, and his wife, Christina Munro. Note that husband and wife are listed with different surnames.

That discovery sent me down a rabbit hole of research, which led me to an informative piece by historian Rebecca Mason. In it, she explains that the practice of women taking their husband’s surname is relatively modern, and largely English in origin. For centuries, women across many parts of Europe kept their family names after marriage—names that held their history, their lineage, their stories.

And it wasn’t just about names. Under the system of coverture, women in England lost their legal personhood upon marriage. They became, quite literally, absorbed into their husbands’ entity—unable to own property, sign contracts, or even be recognized as a separate legal being.

But outside of England, as evidenced by the numerous gravestones I saw with differing marital names in Scotland, women lived by and were buried with their original names—their full, separate selves—literally carved in stone.

It’s wild to think that a practice born from legal erasure is still so common. That I—and so many others—signed onto it without question. That I made it harder, in some subtle way, to stay true to myself.

So here we are.

I’m not divorcing my partner or my past. (In fact, I’m holding them even more closely these days.)

But I am reuniting with a part of myself I didn’t realize I was grieving.

I am holding Treu—to my story, to my voice, to the person I’ve always been underneath it all. I think she’s pretty dang cool.

Thanks for being here with me.

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