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Lawyers are infinitely better suited to answer this question, for the people whose lives will be affected by the eventual ruling inevitably want the judge to do so much than he or she is capable of. “What do you want me to do?” is a question the judge in whose courtroom I sat often asked, not unkindly, after he’d heard from both parties.

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This is why people hire lawyers - even if you manage to figure out which forms to file and when, you still need to know how to provide just enough context without going off-topic how to be specific without introducing unnecessary detail how to present the right kinds of evidence. Legal motions - a request for an order of protection, say or a petition to reevaluate the amount of child support one parent owes the other - are narrow, specific: a small chapter in a much broader narrative.

They don’t really consider money an emergency.” Human vulnerability pressed up against regulatory intransigence regulatory intransigence remained intransigent. “Well, that’s what emergency court dates are for. “Is someone’s life in danger?” the woman who had been helping me asked the man, when he inquired about getting an emergency court date. “I have,” he kept repeating, “no income coming in.” It was patiently explained to him that a judge would have to rule on his case in order to reduce the monthly dollar amount he owed to his ex-wife that he was unlikely to get a court date for several weeks. He was on strike and trying to get his child support payments reduced. While I was there, getting a gold (and legally binding) sticker affixed to one of the various documents I’d filled out, a man walked in.

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So in the end, it seemed easiest to fork over $180 to officially reclaim the name I was already using - possibly fraudulently - on my driver’s license and passport and car insurance. Changing one’s name is time consuming and irritating: no wonder women, and not men, are the ones expected to do it. It was only through trying to navigate the bureaucratic snarl that a change of name engenders that I understood the practical misogyny of the custom.

Unless you make something new up, you will always be inheriting your surname from one man or another. Everything from the infantilizing term - I lost my “maidenhood” long before I married - to the fact that that name, too, symbolizes the long reach of patrilineal power, reeks, to me, of false victories. I’ve never felt the force of the feminist argument against giving up one’s maiden name.

By the time I figured out that social security is the only government office that will accept a marriage certificate as proof of a change of name, I’d been to the RMV twice and spent between fifteen and twenty minutes crying on the floor of my apartment. It’s getting any other institution to recognize said fact that turns out to be tricky. You declare your intention to change your name when you apply for your marriage license, and the minute you pronounce your vows before a justice of the peace, that intention becomes legal fact. I changed my name for the first time when I got married - that part was actually easy. I have been in family court twice the second time was earlier this year, when I paid $180 to change my last name for the second time in six months. The judicial system into which circumstance has dropped them is confusing and labyrinthine besides which, the kind of circumstance that drops you into a hedge-maze of legal paperwork is rarely a happy one.

The two groups are fairly easy to tell apart: it’s not just that the lawyers carry briefcases and favor pantsuits it’s that the non-lawyers look worried. Around me, lawyers and civilians are settling into the gallery in ones and twos and threes. This is a motion day - the judge, instead of presiding over one trial, will rule on dozens of filings. It’s just after nine in the morning inside courtroom five at a probate and family court in Eastern Massachusetts, and the security officer on duty - mid-forties thickly built his bald pate white and gleaming - is listening to a recap of a Red Sox game. Name changes, custody battles, and the beginnings and ends of marriages.

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