What's in a Name?

I, apparently, have some special affinity for last names that no one can pronounce.  I already changed my name once, years ago, the minute I turned eighteen and was legally able to ditch the name of my ne’er do well Father.  After growing up with a last name that, despite being spelled R-U-D-D, was constantly mispronounced “rude”, I swore that I would never again be saddled with a name that rhymed with anything offensive or that people couldn’t pronounce right.  When I came up with Lane, I knew that was my name.  It was easy to spell, no one would mangle it, and there wasn’t some other bitch in SAG using the name “Anna Lane”.  It was my name wet dream and I have no regrets about it.  I do, however, regret the tattoo of a butterfly I got on my ass later that same year. 

When I started dating my Husband and discovered that if he were to make an “honest woman” of me, I’d once again be stuck with some crappy last name, I hesitated.  Sure, I loved the guy, but was I willing to spend my life named after a part of my va-jay-jay?

That’s right, the Hubby’s last name is spelled H-E-Y-M-A-N, but most people look at it and somehow get the word “hymen”.  I hope that his ancestors are appreciative of this close adherence to the pronunciation of a made-up last name given to them by some clerk at Ellis Island who obviously had no knowledge of the female anatomy.  I’m sure the clerk’s wife, however, was extremely unappreciative of her clueless husband.

While for the most part I do think I make a pretty good showing in the wife department, on the issue of changing my name I really can’t be swayed.  Because if I were, as my Mother likes to say, a really good wife, I would be walking around town being addressed as “Mrs. Hymen”.  While I always dreamed of marrying a Nice Jewish Boy, I was hoping for one with a last name more along the lines of Greenberg or Katz (I was also kind of hoping he would be a doctor, but no luck on either of these, unfortunately).

Thankfully, the Hubby is a modern man who happens to be unconcerned with his wife’s last name.  I suppose he figures that as long as I take my meds and I’m not sleeping around, whatever last name I use is the least of his problems.  Or maybe it’s that he still hasn’t quite lived down the humiliation of being called “Hymen” for most of his formative years.  I always tell him to look on the bright said; his first name could’ve been Seymour.