What is your mother’s maiden name?
It’s a culturally specific question, assuming a societal structure in which woman marry, assume the surname of their husbands, and henceforth carry a “maiden” name, their former identity, hidden in the back folds of purses or tucked away in drawers in the form of original birth certificates and high school memorabilia. Who were you before?
The question is fraught with assumptions, not the least of which lie lurking in the word itself – maiden. However, this isn’t about the patriarchy, not this time. This is about the unintended invocation of Nana every time I transact business with the bank.
My mother’s maiden name, a question I’ve been asked countless times for verification purposes since the 90’s, is, of course, my grandmother’s married name, the name she went by the entire time that I knew her. I never addressed her by that name nor her first name, sometimes still referred to as one’s “Christian” name, or “given” name. I knew her as “Nana”.
Nana was about as far removed from banking as frogs are from deserts. As far as I know, she never made a banking transaction in her life. Her father handled financial matters until she married, at which point her husband took care of such things, and when he died, her adult children managed her “affairs”, as they were termed. I don’t think she had a single encounter with an ATM, and she never even touched a computer. I tried to explain e-mail to her one day, but it was pretty clear that I wasn’t getting anywhere. “Well, how do you put a stamp on it?” she kept asking me, meaning, in her own way, who benefits from this transaction? My grandmother wasn’t dumb – she knew that if there was a service, then somehow, somewhere along the line, someone was making money from it. That’s true, of course. I’m guessing a lot more money is made from sending emails than sending letters in envelopes with stamps stuck on the front when you take into account what we pay for the devices we use to send messages, and what we pay to the service provider for our internet capability.
I would never have associated Nana with my banking, but that question kept coming up. What is your mother’s maiden name? As I responded repeatedly to this prompt, over telephones, on websites, thoughts of my grandmother would enter my head each time. Often my neurons would just fire a fleeting image of her remembered face into my mentis oculi. Other times, a specific event or conversation would be recalled, such as the time she deftly plucked out and ate the strawberry from my ice cream cone when I was showing it off to everyone, or the way she would hum unrecognizable tunes in the kitchen when no one else was in there with her.
Predictably, my mother’s maiden name became my password for certain things, or at least part of my password. In the early days of online sites, security was less strict. Passwords could be as short or as long as you liked. The restrictions regarding length and type of characters used didn’t come along until later, after the less scrupulous had managed to correctly guess enough banking passwords to cause banks, and now just about everyone who runs an online site requiring sign-in, to force their clients to choose something that is a little harder to guess easily.
Nana was there every time I transferred funds from one account to another. She was there when I applied for a mortgage. She was there every time I dealt with a branch of the federal or provincial government online. She was there when I signed up for a pension plan, and she was there when I married. (I kept my “maiden” name.) Nana, a woman who never had a password in her life, and never had anything to do with banks, has become inextricably linked to my own financial institution history and present day reality because that name still makes up part of some of my passwords. How could it not? It’s not like I can forget it, and we don’t want to ever, ever forget our passwords in this modern world.
Nana married into a family that ran a bakery, and she knew her way around a rolling pin. For all I know, she had those skills before her marriage; I never thought to ask. The strongest and most persistent memories of my grandmother involve her supervising my budding skills as a pie-maker. We had a sour cherry tree in the backyard, and each summer, before the birds and raccoons could devour them all, I would pick enough for at least one pie. “Roll the dough, don’t stretch it,” I remember her telling me, along with warnings not to over-handle the dough because that would make it “tough”.
She loved to play cards, and I am pretty sure that she spent many hours teaching my sister and me the ins and outs of Go Fish, Gin Rummy, and eventually Cribbage, as we sat around the dining room table, struggling to master the skill of holding several cards in one hand, fanning them out just enough to see their values without dropping any or inadvertently tilting them so other players could see what we had. I remember being surprised to learn that she had once been in a bowling league and had won a trophy or two. Nana just didn’t seem like a physically active person to me. Beyond ironing, or hanging laundry to dry outside on a rack that unfolded like an inverted umbrella to reveal four concentric lines strung in squares on branches that emerged from a central pole, I never saw her engage in anything more strenuous than an evening stroll.
Nana died the way we all imagine dying – of old age. There was no illness, just a fall from which she never really recovered fully. She simply grew older, physically weaker, and mentally less present. Eventually, she slept a lot until that final breath sometime between her 95th and 96th birthday. You would think I might remember her by some piece of inherited jewellery, or each time I pull out some cherished recipe, and I do. Those things do bring her to mind, but it is banking that most frequently conjures up Nana.
If nothing else, this explains why, after checking my account balance online, I sometimes feel the sudden urge to make a cherry pie.
[Note: I realize fully that some dedicated sleuth could uncover my grandmother’s name, but so what? My passwords are not that simple, and for anything I want to protect seriously, I have more than one level of verification.]