My Secret Crime, Aired at Last
January 18, 2026
In my teens, I made, on delighted impulse, a mistake that has haunted me ever since. My grandmother’s name had been bestowed upon me as a middle name, and I loathed the woman. She was a cool and inventive schemer, clever but not gentle, disappointed with her life and taking it out on the rest of us. But while loathing her was perhaps overkill, that was not the mistake.
The mistake came at sixteen, when I blithely decided to insert a wedge between the two of us by changing the spelling of my (and her) middle name, Ann, to the prettier, more ornate Anne. Presto, changeo. I would be Jeannette Anne. No legalities involved; more the way people in some cultures circle three times or stomp their feet to divorce their spouse.
Years later, drowning in marital name-changing paperwork, I came to my senses. Decades of dread, both conscious and unconscious, ensued. Magnified a hundredfold, this must be what it feels like to get away with a crime—then live the rest of your life waiting to be caught. Granted, I was not exactly stuck in Witness Protection. But I had come to realize that I should not have simply taken this name change upon myself. Bureaucracy can seem silly; it can also be weaponized.
Funny, the things that continue to intimidate us even as we rebel. I wrote my middle name as Anne as consistently as I could—but kept Ann for the IRS. It seemed appropriate that only the chilly financial stuff show that original, hated spelling. And I hope to God no one from the chilly financial agency is reading this, because last month, the tension finally broke me.
It was time to sign up for Medicare Part A, a rite of passage far less fun, but just as significant, as getting wed. Online, the Social Security Administration had B. as my middle initial, which was wrong by any count. B was the initial of my maiden name, not either of my middle names. “Should I leave it” I asked the insurance broker who was helping me with the nightmare we call Medicare. “No,” she began, then hesitated, puzzled by the shakiness in my voice. I blurted the entire story.
She took the news calmly, like any good priest-confessor. “What’s on your passport?”
“Anne with an E. The pretty way.”
“Well,” she began, in that tone that heralds bad news, “at some point, they”—the bureaucratic “they,” never quite defined but feared by all—“will try to marry all those records.”
I gulped.
“You should probably go with what’s on your driver’s license,” she suggested.
I dug it out. “Looks like I lied there, too!”
“Okay, go with whatever it says on most of your ID,” she said helplessly. “I’m sure it will be fine. I’ve had clients who changed a ‘y’ to an ‘i’ at the end of their first names….” Her voice trailed off, but I gathered that they did not die. Heartened, I called a local SSA office and made an appointment, explaining that the name on the card was wrong. I told that woman the story, too; the telling was becoming cathartic. She chuckled. “It’s okay. Middle names carry no weight.”
What? When this had weighed on my shoulders for thirty years? She sounded certain, but I checked at home anyway—hoping nobody was tracing my AI queries to make a case for my arrest. Sure enough: “The SSA explicitly states it does not consider middle names or suffixes part of a person’s legal name. For Social Security cards, the ‘legal name’ consists only of the first and last name.” Turns out the SSA takes its own liberties: “Because they are not central to legal identity in many systems, middle names can often be included, omitted, or even incorrectly shown on evidentiary documents without invalidating the document.”
O-kay then. I showed up for my appointment, received my new and correct (in my eyes) Social Security card, and felt almost whole.
But…the IRS. I had thought I could just keep them as the exception, but the tax collectors would eventually need the Social Security records, and my identities were still not, er, married. I would have to confide my past indiscretion to the IRS. Who scare me far worse than my grandmother Ann ever did.
Glum, I tracked down the forms needed for a name change with the IRS. Then I dug out my tax filings—and froze. They only had the middle initial A.! Parsimonious, as they should be, the agency had not encouraged the spelling-out of the middle name. My identity was, therefore, now consistent.
At least until somebody asked for my birth certificate.
Guilt never really ends. Mistakes can be atoned for, but they can never be entirely erased. The brazen name change may not weigh much, but it still sticks to my back with tiny Velcro teeth, refusing to slide off.
Can one forge a birth certificate, sneak in an E?
(I am kidding, surveillers. One crime is sufficient.)
Funny, changing my name when I married felt easy and fine. A bit of hassle, sure, but Cooperman, with its Romanian Jewish no-doubt-misspelled heritage, made a nice change from a four-letter surname with a harsh Z at the end. This other name change, though, this goof all my own, has nagged me my entire adult life. Granted, I could have simply reverted to “Ann,” but dammit, I did not want to. Names matter.
Still, now that I have nearly finished growing up, I realize that I have spun a tangle of seaweed around myself, and it might at some point become difficult to prove that I am who I am. Which, it seems, is my grandmother’s granddaughter. Ann would have pulled something just like this. The difference? She would have never given it another thought—and she would have never gotten caught.
