So You're EnGAYged, a LGBT wedding blog

We decided to combine our names to create a new one. I think it started as kind of joking around, trying to think up names we could make out of all our different family names. Not just the last names we each use, but all of our family names back through or family tree. We came up with a few funny ones – my favourite being Littletuft. I still kinda wanna be the Littletufts, because it sounds so darn cute. But given that we aren’t elves or bunnies, Littletuft didn’t make the cut. But the name that did come out of the exercise actually ended up being the combination of both of our last names! Bek’s last name starts with “Mc” and my last name ends in “bolt”…

that’s right, folks.

McBolt!

Epic, right? In like a B-movie action hero kinda way. Its faux bad-assery was so funny that we thought we couldn’t possibly be a name so rediculous. Or could we? Bek likes to imagine the little league games yelling “Come on, McBolt!” when our little one steps up to the plate. It also sounds good yelled when accompanied with a fist-pump.

So this led to joking about our family crest being a lightning bolt with the Mc – for our legal wedding I had a sweatshirt with this “logo” of ours made for Bek. After our legal wedding we had a little party to celebrate with friends, and a close friend of ours surprised us with having made a sword and shield with our new McBolt “family crest” on it (he’s the props master at Medieval Times)!

Anyway… so the McBolt thing kind of caught on. After we got married and started planning the big second wedding, and were initially squeamish about calling it a wedding in the first place, we used McBoltFest as a sort “working title” for the celebration. Needless to say, it stuck, and all our guests referred to it as McBoltFest. And in Bek’s brother’s speech at the wedding he talked about the coming together of clans, and led everyone in a McBolt battle cry. It was awesome.

How committed have we become to the McBolt thing? We got matching lightning bolt tattoos after a couple too many drinks on the Atlantic City boardwalk on our honeymoon… Scandal! *pictures soooooo not available!*

So to us, and to everyone who knows us, we’re officially the McBolt family. And our kids will have McBolt on their birth certificates. But here’s the tricky thing – we haven’t actually done the legal change yet. We wanted to right after we got married, and then thought we could have the signing of the name-change forms as part of the big second wedding ceremony. But here we are, married two years, and it isn’t done.

The problem was (and is):

1. We were in the process of immigrating Bek to Canada. So we were doing fingerprints, FBI checks, police checks from 3 different states and providing our entire life’s worth of legal ID and government records. NOT a good time to start a legal name change process. The plan was once everything was cleared, and Bek was a legal resident, we change our names. But then it took about 6 months longer to come through than we had anticipated, and in the meantime…
2. Bek had started an MBA program – so had been professionally networking with the original last name. So now there’s the professional consideration of transitioning to a new name while looking for work after graduation.
3. Changing my/our last name here in Canada is easier because we’re legally married and there’s a process already in place to do it. But, it’s a bit more complicated for Bek to do, because it has to be done in two countries. And…
4. It won’t be just changing our names, we then need to resubmit the changes to immigration to change all our files, and we’re understandably nervous about making changes in the system that allows us to live in the same country. We had a couple of difficulties with address changes and with immigration having typos in our names that didn’t get fixed, etc. It might not be as big a deal as we’re thinking, we just get nervous easily. So we’ve thought about maybe waiting till Bek is a full citizen before doing the name change. But…
5. That won’t be for a few more years, and at that point we’ll both be further into our careers, and we’ll already have kids with names different than ours, and we worry we might not see the point anymore and then not bother.

And everytime we bring it up we just kind of get frustrated and overwhelmed about what to do and so we put off the conversation. Doing this post brought the conversation up again, and it still just came around to “Yeah, I guess we should do that, or something… let’s talk about it later…”

All this to say that once again the two different nationalities and immigration and having our marriage recognized in one country but not the other gets in the way. But as frustrating as it is, we’re still fortunate to at least have some options. And to us and everyone who knows us we have a family name. I think in the next year as the kids become a reality it’ll force us to figure out what we’re doing and get ‘er done!

Related Posts:

• 5 Takes: Getting Married With and Without Your Family
• 5 Takes: Why Marriage?
• Making Babies: Planning How to Plan
• 5 Takes: The Headache of Legally Changing Last Names
• 5 Takes: Changing My Name