In my predominantly Italian hometown of Staten Island, New York, you were Irish if your last name didn’t end in a vowel. And if you weren’t Irish, you were other. I fell squarely into that category. Couple that with the fact that my last name, though short, was hard to pronounce and easy to make fun of (butt kiss, body gas, so many options), and marriage seemed like my only salvation — a socially acceptable path to a more socially acceptable last name.
I even found my husband early in middle school. I liked him for many reasons, not least of all his possession of a lyrical Italian last name with an equal amount of vowels and consonants. It’s welcome in Staten Island and elsewhere and seemingly impossible to mock everywhere.
I never expected to keep my name and give it to our kids.
I didn’t think my husband’s name was an option for me
Fast-forward 12 years, when we were finally getting hitched. A long courtship gave me lots of time to think about how only a handful of people in the world have my last name. Of that handful, I was the only one of the youngest generation planning to have children. Letting this last name die felt worse than my children potentially being on the receiving end of body gas taunts.
Separately, my husband’s last name lost some of its appeal. One night during our engagement, we were paying for our meal at our neighborhood Italian joint. When our server returned to our table with my husband’s credit card, the server muttered my husband’s last name with disgust and then pretended to spit on our receipt. We figured he was joking, but we didn’t get the joke. Eventually, we learned my husband’s last name meant he likely descended from Pontius Pilate, aka the Roman who demanded Jesus be crucified. Not the greatest branch of a family tree, nor a name I could continue to believe was categorically better than mine.
On the other hand, my last name came from the German word for “bathhouse.” Whether this meant my ancestors owned one, just frequented one, or used it to get clean or engage in more scandalous activities, this felt like a hilarious part of my identity I couldn’t lose.
Our wedding came and went. My name stayed the same.
I had a harder time with last names than first names when it came to our kids
Five years later, I was expecting our first child. It was tougher to choose his last name than his first. Around this time, we were also trying to sell our apartment and buy a house. Then we got some bad news from our real estate attorney: There was a lien on our apartment.
We were flummoxed when our lawyer gave us the unfamiliar name of the person who placed the lien. What was more confusing: The person lived nowhere near us. The one thing we knew was that until we removed the lien, no one was going to buy our apartment.
It turned out the lien was intended for some ne’er-do-well with my husband’s exact same name, a guy who owed a lot of people a lot of money. A couple of affidavits later, the lien problem was resolved. But then I got a threatening social media message from a different creditor in upstate New York, convinced they’d found a way to get a note to the apparently hard-to-reach ne’er-do-well. I told the messenger they had the wrong guy. He didn’t apologize, but he never contacted me again. With my almost-unique last name, my kids would never be the wrong guy. That felt like a nice gift to pass down.
After much back-and-forth, my husband and I decided to hyphenate our kids’ last names. This ensured they would each be the one and only, impossible to confuse with any other individual. It also guaranteed rude comments: “How are they going to be able to spell all that?” “Did you name them that on purpose?” and the especially astute, “Wow, that’s a long name.”
Despite those real rude comments and some relatives who refuse to acknowledge both parts of their names, we’re happy with our decision. Our kids, now 7 and 10, have fewer issues with their long name than I did with my short one. We live in a much more diverse area than my husband and I grew up in, so there are all kinds of names here, even other hyphenated ones. We talk all the time about how cool it is that there’s no one else out there with their name, and they seem to appreciate that. I only wish I had done the same sooner.
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