Boy was I WRONG! I thought I was smart. I looked it up online to see what I would need to take with me because it's been a very long time since I had to renew my license. It expires in a few months and I need what they now call a REAL ID. Missouri is weird and refused to jump on the real ID bandwagon when the federal government rolled it out. The feds said fine, but none of your people, holding one of your driver's licenses will be able to fly on an airplane if they do not have a real ID. So now you have a choice to get one in Missouri and today I was choosing to get one.
I needed one for two reasons. 1. I'm moving to Florida where I will have to get a Florida license. Guess what? I will have to retake all tests, etc. and start over again like a teenager if I do not have a real ID in Florida. I can't just transfer my Missouri license because I didn't adequately prove who I was when I got it. The birth certificate, social security card, divorce decree from the first husband, and marriage license to the second husband don't count. Okay, I'll get a real ID for that.
Reason number two is that I'm going to have to be able to fly, sometime in here, during the moving process, and I don't need this hassle in my life. Ok, I'll get a real ID for that too.
I go to the DMV, with my husband, I might add, who is also getting his. He has zero problems. He gets right in and can get his done. Me? Not so much. I'm being penalized for being a married woman. First, my marriage certificate to my husband, whom I've been married to for 17 years, isn't good enough and neither is our tax paperwork or anything else to show my name changes. No, I have to go to the courthouse and get a copy of the marriage license (for which I actually have the original, signed on the day we got married in the woman's hand) certified by the court. They want the bit that was filed with the court after we got married, but it has to have an official seal on it that you pay $9 for when you get it. So I walk the two blocks down to the courthouse, that you can never find a parking space in front of, and go up to the second floor to get a the bored woman behind the counter to print a copy of my marriage license. She prints it, puts a sticker on it, and uses an official seal on it, then takes my $9.
I truck myself back the two blocks to the DMV while my husband is happily finishing up getting his license to present my stuff to the attendant. She sees my divorce decree from my first husband (an idiot I was married to for like a minute in my early 20's) and insists that I have to have an official copy of my marriage license to him too. Good grief. She has my divorce decree! She says they have to track my name changes from my birth certificate, which, of course, has my maiden name on it. OMG. Insert eye roll here. All right. So I hike the two blocks back to the courthouse for a copy of the marriage license to the ex idiot, whom I haven't laid eyes on in over 20 years.
This visit prompts a round of discussion from every female I know in the courthouse who saw me the first time. Everyone was in agreement that they'll never change their names again and if they had it to do over again, they wouldn't change them the first time. I told my husband that I was telling my daughters not to change their names when they got married. It's just not worth the hassle! Men don't have this problem because they don't take our names when they marry us. I ended up having to produce two CERTIFIED copies of my marriage certificates, a divorce decree, my social security card, my birth certificate, a utility bill, my W-2, my old driver's license, and something else, but I can't remember what that was anymore because I think overkill on proving who I was made my brain short circuit.
The part I found most annoying about this? My husband was in and out of there within 20 minutes where it took me over an hour because he never changed his name. I feel that's not fair and I predict that women, who already are opting to not change their names in massive quantities, will change their names even less. The societal expectation that a woman will change her name, when she gets married, is about to become too much trouble to make it happen. It was already to a pain to get a new license and social security card after you got married, now it's an even bigger pain with all the new rules.