>What’s in a name?

>Well, I’m finally returning to the land of the living after a week and a half.  Many people have asked about the c-section experience (compared to the first), how my recovery is going, what it’s like having a newborn again, how Sebastian is handling it all, etc.  Sounds like I need to do a FAQ post next.  But the name thing is what’s on my mind today, so that’s what I’m going to write about.

First, about the easy parts of the names.  People have asked me how we chose the boys’ names, if they have any significance, etc.  So the answer is yes and no.  We just liked Sebastian and Theodore.  They felt right and were not ridiculously common (I hated being “Jessica F.” all through school, even though I loved my name), but are traditional enough to not be confusing to people or often misspelled or mispronounced.

As for middle names, we took Sebastian’s middle name – Paul – from many members of our family.  Most notably, that is my grandfather’s first name and my brother’s middle name.  It is also the name or middle name of several uncles and a cousin.

Theo’s middle name – Nathan – came from taking off the first two letters off Jonathan’s name.  We contemplated using Nathan as a first name, but it’s just crazy common and didn’t seem to fit this little person. My husband also thinks it’s cool that Theodore has the same name meaning as Jonathan, which is “gift of God.”

So that’s it for the first two names.  Now for the last two…

If  you know us in real life or have read on the blog, you know that “Rasler” is not the official last name of any member of my family.  It is a blend of my last name and my husband’s that we use as a kind of unifier when it’s helpful to refer to ourselves collectively.  In my experience, this is the main reason why so many people (women, mostly) change their names when they get married – to feel like they are part of one family unit.

For lots of reasons that I will write about passionately at some other time, I didn’t change my name when I got married, but I still craved that sense of family unity, and it only intensified when we started talking about having kids.  What would their last name be??

As a teacher, I’ve bumped into many families in which the children had a different last name from one or both parents.  Usually this was due to the fact that one parent was a step-parent or that the mom kept her own name upon getting married.  Never once in all of my experience with different schools, states, and families had I ever met a child who had his or her mother’s last name and not the father’s if they weren’t the same.
Never once.
Not even when the child lived with only the mother.

I find this bothersome.  Extremely.  Especially in those cases in which the child’s father was barely or not at all in the picture.

(Note:  There are instances – now even with one of my cousins! – in which this isn’t the case.  It just was the fact two+ years ago when my husband and I were debating this.)

Anyway.  So whose last name should the child get in our family??  My husband and I knew that we needed and wanted both our last names represented in the child’s full name, particularly so that there would never be an issue crossing the border to visit relatives in Canada and having a border guard not believe that a child belonged to one of us due to the different names.  So we decided to give all of our children four names – one first, two middle, one last.  This would solve the passport and doctor problems should there be any concern, but leave things simple enough for school and everyday use so that we would avoid the dreaded hyphenated last name!

So whose last name would be last??  We decided to let the sex of the first baby be the coin toss.  If we had a boy, his last name would be my husband’s.  If a girl, my last name.  The second child would be the opposite regardless of sex so that no one parent would be the odd one out should we have all girls or all boys.

And so.  Sebastian has my name as his second middle name, and his father’s name as his last.  Which means Theo has my name last.

In a short time this has already brought up a bunch of questions.  Here are my answers.

Do you think it will be confusing to the boys to have different last names?
Probably not much.  They will see each other as brothers first and know that they each have both names in their full names.  Sebastian doesn’t seem at all confused about the fact that his parents have different last names because kids don’t come preprogrammed with that cultural knowledge.  For all he knows now, all parents are like that.  And when he’s old enough to ask questions, we have plenty of answers about why we made the choices we did.  It will be the same about why they have their names in opposite order.

Do you worry that they won’t think they’re brothers?
Not in the slightest.  If anything, they may thank us someday for allowing them some breathing room in school from always being compared to each other right away.

Will other people be confused?
From only 12 days of Theo’s existence, I can already say that the answer to this will be yes.  People will assume that Theo is mine but not Jonathan’s, which will be confusing to them since we’re still married and Sebastian has his last name.  They will ask questions like whether Theo is his natural son or whether the boys are related (yes, I have already gotten both questions from the health professionals we’ve seen in the past week and a half).  They may think we are odd or overly PC or that I have some sort of commitment issue to my marriage (yes, I’ve had people make comments and jokes about that many times in the six years of married life).

I don’t care.  It made me beyond happy today to not have to specify that Theo’s last name was different than mine when I took him to his first official doctor’s appointment.  And I’m sure it makes my husband happy that Sebastian has his name.  And it makes us both happy that when you say their full names, they are both little Raslers – a wonderful combination of us and the people who gave us our names in the first place.

So what’s in a name?  In the case of our boys, a lot of thought and love and family ties, and just enough confusion to make people stop and think.