We had our living room painted a couple weeks ago, and the painter was back the other day for a touch-up. In between, I’ve had probably a half-dozen phone calls or conversations with him. He always calls me “Mrs. Noga.”

It’s only logical. He knows my last name, seen me with my two kids, heard me refer to my husband. And technically I suppose it’s not incorrect. I’m married. “Mrs.” is the title for married. (While I don’t understand why a courtesy title needs to convey marital status, I’ve never had a bugaboo about “Mrs.” — unlike the one I have about people assuming I share my husband’s last name.) And since my last name is Noga, ergo, Mrs. Noga.

It’s just that Mrs. Noga has always been my mom.

But I didn’t correct or explain. I didn’t even really smile or shrug privately to myself about how I just don’t seem to wear traditions well.  I just went with it. Though among my own friends’ children I’m usually called by my first name, I know many families that require titles. As my son gets older and starts bringing friends home, I figure I’ll have to learn to live with Mrs. something. It might as well be half right. Right?

Now I’m wondering, though. Does cherry-picking my name peeves make me hypocritical? Will this path of least resistance circle back to box me in? What do you think?

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.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, right? Pretty much all of them rushing through my mind following this incident while backing out of the garage yesterday morning were of the four-letter variety. (I did manage to refrain from giving voice to them, due to the four-year-old in the back seat.)

Shiza.

What galls  me most, though, is how it feels like Fate not only dealt me a raspberry, but a rotten raspberry,  one that was accompanied by a spiteful “nyah nyah nyah” just before that plastic cracked. Even before this, the morning had been  lousy. Tuesdays are already the most frantic day of the week, with the four of us  headed in four different directions instead of the usual two or three. It’s garbage day. It was raining. Owen woke up too early, gave us a throwback day on his potty-going, refusing to do it and then being whiny for a half-hour afterward. Mike had had to make a 6 a.m. grocery run for milk and was running late.

Despite all that, I stayed cool.  Mentally, I stiff-armed the prevailing cranky household mood. With Mike and Audrey out the door for daycare and work, I had an hour before I could take Owen to school and go on to work myself. In the zen zone, I emptied the dishwasher of last night’s dinner clean-up. Put the breakfast dishes away. Made lunch for Mike and Owen, and not just to score wife points. Packed my own lunch and swimming gear for my lunchtime lap workout. Filled out the school picture form. Got Owen successfully on the potty again. Managed to avoid an argument over wearing sneakers rather than the hole-int-the-sole Crocs he loves that are inappropriate on a 50-degree rainy day.  Out the door on time, congratulating myself.

And then - crack.

One of the hardest things to deal with after becoming a parent of two is how every bit of my mental reserves are sapped. Prior to kids, and even after the adjustment to the first, I always found some extra energy, patience or time to call on when everyday life  glitches and problems — like the mirror — arose.  No more. I’m drained by the simple daily routine. But on Tuesday, I was still handling it all. That’s why the mirror incident felt like such a rotten raspberry.

“I was doing it!” I silently shrieked at Fate as I yanked our stuff out of the car and transferred it to the bike trailer. (Can’t drive with the mirror banging on the door. Fortunately preschool and work are pretty close by.) “I was staying positive. I was coping. And now you hand me this?”

She didn’t answer, of course. If she did, she probably would have said, “Hey, couldn’t you have looked a little more carefully before you backed up? Especially after you snapped off the side mirror on the other car doing the exact same thing less than a year ago? ” Fate’s comforting like that.

But seriously. How do people manage to roll with the proverbial punches, especially in these times? I know this is a minor incident compared to unemployment and other recession-driven circumstances many people find themselves in now. How do you stay in the zen zone?