Before I had kids but while pregnant with my first, I took a nephew I was babysitting to the park. There I was introduced to Parent Small Talk: the conversations temporary comrades-in-swing-pushing will strike up.

These conversations nearly always start the same way: “How old is s/he?”

If one comrade’s child is reasonably close in age to the other’s — or if there’s another connection, say a sibling of about the same age

A rose. OK, not. But is it any less beautiful?

- the next question is always: “What’s her/his name?”

With a rapport thus established, the conversation may veer in any number of directions, but the unspoken ground rule is that kids remain the subject. Parents almost never insert themselves into these chats, not even to introduce each other. Appalled at how these parents appeared to willingly surrender their identities, I returned from that park visit and vowed to my husband I would always ask other comrade swing-pushers their names.

Like most vows made in indignation, my commitment has waned. As my two kids entered daycare, I even accepted being greeted, “Hi, Owen’s mom.” Given my ambivalence over the “Mrs.” title and having a different last name than my first, it was just an easier way to deal with two- and three-year-olds.

But I hadn’t realized that I myself had adopted this habit until today, the last day of preschool. I’m the drop-off parent. Since school began last September, I’ve found myself on almost the exact same arrival schedule as two other dads. So greeting them has become part of the routine. Today, as I wished one a good summer, I was stunned to realize, I don’t know his name. He’s Will’s dad. After nine months of crossing paths twice weekly, that’s my only handle.

The other guy is Sam and Betsy’s dad. I did know his name once - we were also in swimming lessons together a couple years ago - but heck if I can remember it. I also thought he was a pharmacist, because I saw him wearing a pharmacy logo shirt back at the beginning of the year. Yesterday when we had a longer conversation, I found out he’s actually an accountant. Reality sends another perception reeling.

But when I think more about it, what further insight would their names give me?  Let’s call Will’s dad John and Sam and Betsy’s dad Joe. I already know John and Joe are good dads. John had a funny routine he used in the winter when peeling off Will’s layers — seeing the cooperation he got, I even cribbed a bit of it. Joe bikes with his kids like we have been lately. One day when Betsy was upset about something I saw him being very kind and tender to her.

Like me, at Christmas time, John thought he missed the opportunity to buy a teacher gift, and ‘fessed up, finding out he wasn’t too late, after all. Joe knows Owen’s name and says hello to him. They both seem to be good guys, doing their best with this whole parenting thing. Just like me.

Hard to admit though it is, maybe my lesson this school year is that in some roles, in some circumstances, names aren’t that integral to identity, after all.

PS - Good to be posting again after being MIA in May. I’ll have more to say about May at a later date.

This article on the last name dilemma faced by married women has been popping up frequently in my Google alerts of late, as it makes its rounds through wire services and syndication and blogs. Two things made it noteworthy to me:

1) Written by Canadian Elsie Hambrook, chairperson of the New Brunswick Advisory Council on the Status of Women, it quotes a Canadian magazine survey as finding that 69 percent of prospective Canadian brides plan to take their husbands’ last names. Hambrook doesn’t say it straight out, but implies this is disappointing. But from south of the border, where a whopping 90 percent of married women adopt the Mrs. moniker, I find that heartening.

2) I like the part that is used in the pull quote. Of the last name choice, Hambrook says, “There are no rules without exceptions, no guidelines that are infallible. There is also no surrender without loss, no action without a message.” That second sentence was edited out of other versions I saw, and, as conversations with other women have revealed, it’s so true. When women give up part of their identity, they lose something.

In the interest of fairness, it’s true that something is also lost by not yielding to prevailing winds and taking a husband’s name. Every so often I get hit with a panic attack that the kids will, at some point in the future, get tagged as weird for our dual last names. (Tonight being one of those times, having just returned from a nametag function in which almost every pair of spouses I saw sported matching labels.) Then I get mad about the lack of good options that drove us to this situation. Which makes me resolve to broadcast our choice far and wide, (hence this blog post) in the hope that eventually it will spread to the point where it becomes a good option (one that doesn’t make people feel weird.) Then I’m happy again.

Usually, New Year’s Eves are inherently nostalgic for me. Even if the past 365 days weren’t the greatest – as was true in 2009, what with infant sleep struggles, toddler potty training struggles, a parade of home repairs and my mother-in-law’s cancer recurrence – I  reflect with my rose-colored glasses firmly perched on. (As an aside, I always kind of wanted a pair of those oversize, glittery New Year’s specs you see the Time Square crowd sporting, with the two zeroes as the lenses. Never got one, and now the decade’s over. Yeah, yeah, I know, not really. A pair of 2010s is still going to obstruct your vision, mathematicians.)

Point is, time flies. And as both this year and decade close out, I’m realizing several of my life’s eras also wrapped up during the ‘00s.

• My single life (met husband in ’01; married in ’03)
• My life with both parents (dad died in ’02)
• My pre-parental life (’05, ‘08)
• My uncommitted life (see all of the above, plus a mortgage)
• My thirties (July ’09)
• My journalist life (for the most part. While I blog, my last paid byline was in August ‘09)

It’s taken me the second half of this past decade to come to terms with a lot of those endings, though I chose most voluntarily – another example of nostalgia at work. You alter your circumstances, then gaze longingly back at the way life was. Parenthood especially. I love my kids. But during infancy and toddlerhood, the ratio of rewarding to slogging is seriously skewed to the latter. Thankfully, we’ve only getting older to look forward to.

Now less than 12 hours from a new decade, I’m ready to exchange nostalgia for anticipation. What will the 2010s, my forties, hold? Does my best-selling novelist life lie ahead? The life when I incorporate my family into the travel that I loved pre-2005? What sad endings that I wouldn’t choose – like my dad’s death – lie ahead?

Carly Simon sang that these are the good old days. We’ll see in 2019. Now, let’s get started.