The Name Game

We haven't even set a date and I'm already stressed about "the name thing". What can I say, I'm a champion stresser.

The thing is...I love my name. Sarah Catherine Holmberg - means Princess Pure of the River City, and if I were ever going to be a superhero, that would be my moniker. I love that I, my mother and my grandmother all have the same middle name. I love that Holmberg means River City, since I live in Minneapolis (which means Water City - the water in this case being the Mississippi River) and that Holmberg ties me to my Scandinavian heritage. I love sharing a last name with my brother, and that "don't be a Holmberg" has become a way of saying "don't be a smartass" with our group of friends. I've even grown to love Sarah, though I hated it as a kid. Too many people with that name, too little individuality to it. But now...30 years of having that name, I just don't see how I can give it up.

And Justin supports my desire to not change my name. He told me not to change it, though I don't know how much of that was simply him supporting me and how much of it is that even for him my name *is* my name, and changing it now would take a lot of getting used to. If only he were keeping his last name of Bacon it wouldn't be an issue at all (because no way am I going to have my moniker turn into "Princess Pure Pork") but as he's planning on dropping his last name and going by Justin Alexander (a name he's been using professional for writing and acting for a couple years now) it makes it a little more difficult, as Alexander isn't such a bad last name. It's just not my name.

So I'll be Sarah Holmberg, and he'll be Justin Alexander, and there's no problems with that. That is great. But when we have kids (and yes, at this point it's a when, not an if - hence the stressing) what name do they get?

The options I've thought about/found -

1) they get his last name
2) they get my last name
3) they get a hyphenated version of our last names
4) we make up a new last name for our kids - either combining our last names into a new name or just making one up out of whole cloth
5) if we have girls, they get my last name, and boys get his last name (or vice versa)
6) we say fuck it and don't give them last names

The problem with options 1 and 2 are that it leaves one of us with a different name from the rest of the family. When I presented the idea of our kids having the FirstName Alexander Holmberg, Justin replied that he didn't want to go into Parent-Teacher meetings and have people assume he wasn't the birth father just because he didn't have the same name as the kid, which I totally understand. I feel the same way. I don't want people assuming I'm a step-mom because I have a different name, which I think they would.

3 is problematic in that I don't even want to be burdened with a last name of Holmberg-Alexander (or Alexander-Holmberg), so why would I put that kind of bulk on our kids? Though I wonder if we didn't give our kids middle names so that it became FirstName Alexander-Holmberg, would Justin respond better to the idea? I'll have to ask him about that.

4 sounds like it could work if Holmberg and Alexander blended together better. Holmander and Alexaberg aren't great last names.

With 5 I worry that our kids would feel like we were playing favorites or some weird disconnect by having different connections to their parents. And of course if we pick this option we'll totally have two boys and I'll end up being the odd-one out anyway.

6 is something my brother and I joked about - dropping our last names altogether. When we realized that we had 4 parents, each with a different last name, we joked that we should either take all 4 names or have none at all. I liked the idea, as I think Sarah Catherine is a good name on it's own, but poor Andrew Clayton didn't think it was so great. Not that Sarah Catherine Holmberg-Hines-Iverson-Uselman rolls off the tongue. Maybe if I add Alexander to the end?

I think at the heart of the issue is a conflict between my desire to keep a name I love and a desire to share a family name. The sharing of a family name is made up of two parts - there's the emotional part of liking how names and traditions connect families together, and the more practical part of not wanting to be thought of as the step-mom. I understand all of my mother's reasons for changing her name back to Hines after the divorce, and think it suits her very well, but it wasn't easy having a different name from her, especially when I was younger and she was the one who did most of the parenting. Certainly Justin's reasoning indicates that he intends to be an active parent, not just a "this is how it's done" response, and that's fantastic, but it doesn't really help my dilemma any.

As awful as it feels to think about being the one with the odd name, I don't want either of us to feel that way. But I don't think I should be the one to have to go through it just because of tradition.

One thing we talked about was them taking his last name and finding a way to have a tie to my family through names in another way - if we have a girl, they get the middle name Catherine, and with boys they get the middle name Clayton (which is both Andrew's middle name and my father's middle name). Of course, I really dislike the name Clayton, so that doesn't seem like a real great solution.

I think I keep returning to FirstName Alexander Holmberg because Alexander can work as a middle name, but maybe FirstName Holmberg Alexander is an option. It solves the emotional part of the problem, if not the practical part, though with Holmberg being clearly more appropriate as a last name, teachers and doctors would hopefully make the connection.

And of course we're years away from all this. But I feel like it's important to think about it, and to make choices based on what makes sense, what feels right, not just tradition. I have a lot of issues with the social conventions in our society, and I feel that the way to improve things is not to reject things completely out of hand, but to analyze them, break them down, and think about them, and to make deliberate choices. The more blogs I read, the more women I find who think it's the law that they take their husbands name, or that there isn't any other options out there, and it just frustrates me to no end.

*Edited to add:

I just found this blog posting about naming children that made a point I haven't seen made anywhere else - "Given that maternity is never in doubt, paternal surnames function, socially, as a man's acknowledgement of his paternal responsibility. Using the man's name amounts to a public signal that the man believes this is his child, and accepts his parental role." The whole post is really excellent, and again points to something that I think is at the heart of my struggle with this - I don't want to just do something just because "that's the way it's done".