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Tuesday, April 19, 2011

What's in a Name, anyway?

Chef and I are going to get our marriage license on Friday. We have 90 days from that point to get hitched or we have to go through the process again and pay the $90 yet again. I am currently at lunch and decided to hop on the LA County Registrar's site to see about filling out the online application for the license.

I got stumped on the first section. Not the questions about Chef, but about me. I'm changing my last name to match his. Not that hard of a decision and one I'm happy to do. Not that I don't love my identity and my last name (it's served me well for 32 years so far), but I'm tired of my poor four letters being mangled in the pronunciation. Now my new four letter last name will be mangled in an entirely different way.

That wasn't the stumper. Here's the stumper: what to make my new middle name?

I'm seriously at a loss. My current middle name is my mother's maiden name and my last name is clearly my father's name. it's like playing Sophie's Choice in reverse. Logically, I know that if I do the traditional thing and make my former last name my new middle name, it doesn't hurt my mom or her family. But still.

It doesn't feel right to keep my current middle name and toss aside my last name. Nor does it feel like "me" to go behind door number three and hyphenate them both to make a combined middle name. That just seems like more trouble than it's worth. I'm not a hyphenate-kind of girl.

So instead of filling out the form, I closed the window and started this blog post. It's not a bad thing to love so many families so much that you want to make sure you're always instantly linked as being a part of them. But hey, I've got three days to make a decision and a lifetime to second-guess it, so why am I stressing now?

4 comments:

Shera said...

What's wrong with keeping all 4 names with no hyphens? You don't have to use them all, all of the time.

Hoosier Chick said...

it wasn't listed as an option on the form! Maybe I should just type it in and see what happens.

Candace said...

My son has four names, yes I did that to him when he was born, his first name is his alone, Nathaniel,
his middle name Keith was my first husbands middle name and oddly enough my current husbands 1st name,happy coincidence or fate??, his 3rd name is my last name White in honor of my father who died when I was 13, also the reason I've kept it thru 2 marriages(and I'm stubborn dammit) and his bio-fathers last name Davis, its also makes nice initials NKWD, but it has caused some issues as Americans and their FORMS only allow most times for 3 names (not so in other countries) but I look at it this way, now he has a choice and can choose from any combination he wants and still have the legal right to use any or all of them.

Shera said...

Maybe you can list Clark Wrye in the middle name field with a space.

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