So You're EnGAYged, a LGBT wedding blog

I’ve been thinking lately about names.  At least part of this started with that terrifying story of the woman who was hospitalized in south Florida while getting onto a cruise and whose partner and children were denied access to her bedside by the hospital staff.  I want to know the best way to deal with a situation like that in case, god forbid, it ever happens to us.  Would having the same name be some sort of get-in-free card smoothing confused staff members into believing that we really are related before they get a chance to discriminate?  What if it was a child who was in the hospital—would the same name (and both names on the birth certificate) make some small but crucial difference?

But part of this is being inspired by other (less scary) things.  The least of these was in choosing a return-address stamp and being annoyed that there is no way to get a monogram with more than one last initial.  Then there’s the house I walk by on my way to work with a sign saying “The Nelson’s” which I note every time for both its incorrect punctuation and the sort of cozy implications of family that come from having a shared name.  And I think about our imaginary future children and wonder if I’ll be sad that we don’t all have the same name—and the immediate recognition from strangers that we are family.  I realize that people will know that we’re a family anyway and that my kids will be my kids whether we’re called the same thing or not (my two stepsiblings each have different last names, and both are different from their mother’s, and they are obviously related to one another), but I can’t seem to stop thinking about it.

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