Why my two children have different last names —
. My eldest daughter has my last name, and her younger sister has my husband’s. But I’m not divorced, I haven’t remarried and they aren’t my stepchildren . In my eyes, we look the same on paper as we do in real life—a family of four individuals—and that’s just how we wanted it.
When my husband and I got married, there was no question that we would keep our own names. We both had established careers and, more importantly, we both viewed marriage as a union of equals—we vowed to love each other and grow old together. Neither of us wanted the other to change identities. But when it came to any potential children, we weren’t quite sure how to proceed. The thing is, our two family names are too phonetically similar to sound good together—it would make a mushy mess that would only become compounded in the next generation if our kids married people with hyphenated names. Plus, it didn’t feel right for my family history and heritage to be tucked away as a second middle name or discarded entirely in favour of my husband’s history and heritage.
When my husband floated the idea that we pick names based on how well they worked with our surnames—one with his and one with mine—it just felt right. I remember asking “Is that totally weird?” but immediately loved what an elegant solution it was. Winnowing down all those possibilities to our favourites was suddenly incredibly easy.With that simple decision, we diverged from what most other Canadians choose.
When people find out this odd piece of trivia about me, they inevitably ask about all the problems that these different last names must cause at daycare, school and doctors’ offices. My response is bit of a letdown: In the decade that we’ve been a four-person, two-surname family, our nonconformist approach to naming hasn’t caused a single incident.
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