This is part of a series of posts on Jewish Wedding Network exploring a woman’s name change after marriage.

I was born five months after a “shot gun wedding.” The marriage ended before my first tooth came in and my mother remarried when I was five. My half-brother was born shortly thereafter, and the four of us lived together for my entire childhood—the three of them with one last name, and me with my father’s.

When I was eleven,  my father stopped coming to see me, leaving me feeling utterly abandoned, but at age 16 I was legally adopted by my step father, and got a new last name. Four people under one roof with the same surname at last. I was back to having “a real dad”.

Four years after the adoption, I was thrown out of the house by my unstable parents.  For the second time in my life, I felt abandoned. If you’re counting, that’s three parents that let me way down, all by the age of 20.  I  had considered changing my last to reflect my new loner status, something all my own. I didn’t have the guts to though, which is regretful; it would have helped me make peace with the situation.

I learned to accept and love my parents with distance, and having their last name was something I stopped thinking about altogether, for a while…

When I was 25 I married  Rob. It wasn’t important (to either of us) that I change my last name to his, and life carried on just fine until somewhere after my wedding when I realized I hadn’t heard from my step dad in a while, and he hadn’t returned any of my calls.  My mother and I had stopped speaking again too. So, there I was: married to an amazing man with a name I had a really hard time accepting (it rhymes with Fat!), carrying the name of people who didn’t love me anymore. What to do? To further complicate things, kids are in our future, and naming them would be a whole new set of tough questions; I am NOT a fan of “just giving them the father’s name” so we’d have to think long and hard about a solution.

Since I wanted to shed my last name, I went back and forth with a variety of options for a new one, including the option of picking a random one for myself and giving the children a hyphenated “my last name, his last name.”  So much about this option appealed to me: feminist sensibilities are in tact, I could pick whatever I wanted, and I would finally have my name stand on it’s own two feet. But the truth is, I don’t stand on my own two feet, I stand with Rob, and I like it. I’d waited my whole life to be in any sort of stable relationship, and here it is. I wanted to share a name with him whether we switched to something completely new or I took his. He was against changing his name, because he is established professionally with it, and is very close to his family, so I was becoming a Blatt!

That’s part one.

Another matter was my middle name. I was born Amber Lynn in 1982, but Amber Lynn the porn star got wildly famous (in part because of her charity work) in 1984. As you can imagine, I don’t mention my middle name too often. It is also my mother’s middle name. This meant I was carrying the last AND middle names of people that I don’t have in my life anymore. As long as I’m shedding old names, I figured, why not get rid of this, too, and make a new name for myself?

So that’s part two.

Part three, of course, was picking a new middle name, which I narrowed down to two requirements:

1. It had to sound plausible as a last name. This clears up the whole “I’ve never had my own last name” issue, at least to my satisfaction. To get a good list to choose from I went to babynames.com and looked at the names considered gender neutral. This worked well; virtually all made great sounding family names.

I wanted it to sound like a surname so that it reads as a maiden name, sort of like Hillary Rodham Clinton (no hyphen). I like that; you can call her Hilary Clinton, but if you’re being proper and entirely correct, you use all three names, and that’s how I’m treating the middle name for me, too.

2. The second requirement is that it just had to start with M. Here’s the part you start wondering what I’m smoking, but bear with me. The M is a sturdy letter, visually. It has two strong, wide-set feet. You pronounce it only one way as far as I know; the M knows what she’s all about. By using a lot of them, you can say “yes” in a sassy way, as in “Mmmmmhmmm!”

After a lot of back and forth, I picked Marlow.

Amber Marlow Blatt

It’s a big name, I know. A mouthful. The name equivalent of unbuttoning my pants and letting my big old belly hang out, standing in the middle of the room with my feet planted in a wide stance (just like the letter M), stopping up the flow of traffic at the house party, I’m-in-your-way-and-I-like-it kind of name. The Marlow softens it, I think, kind of a cushion to your forehead after the Amber, and right before the Blatt knocks you, twack! like a two-by-four. It’s quiet, and warm and solid.

Everyone has to make their own path in life, I just wish that mine wasn’t so strange, sometimes. In the end, though, if I get to be here, it was worth it.

Amber Marlow Blatt shares more stories of love, life, and marriage on her personal blog TheAmberShow.net

Photo credit: Toby Morris

This is the first in an ongoing series of posts on Jewish Wedding Network exploring a bride’s name change after marriage.

On October 7, 2007  I walked down the aisle flanked by Annette and Bill Friedson, my amazing (and teary-eyed) parents.   After seven dizzying circles, seven prayers and one big stomp, I emerged as Rachel Friedman, a 23-year-old newly-wed, glowing with happiness as I walked hand-in-hand with my husband.

If you didn’t read that carefully, you may not have even noticed the difference. Friedson to Friedman. Those two tiny letters have served as the ultimate pain-in-the-butt and resulted in a lifetime of mispronunciations and misnomers.

Imagine going to the DMV – quite possibly the most inefficient and awful hellhole to have to go to in the first place – wedding license in hand and on a mission to change your name. The story goes something like this:

Me: Hi – I need to get a new license, because I got married and I’m changing my name.
DMV Employee: (glancing at paperwork in hand) What are you talking about? – the names here are the same.
Me: Nope – check out those last three letters.
DMV Employee: Ooooh – hahahahahaha.

Now reenact that story with the Social Security office, the bank, the credit card company, my employer, and all the other people who inevitably had to be notified, and let me tell you, that joke got old fast. “Are you going to hyphenate?” No. “Are you sure you’re not related?” Yes. “How about merging the two to become Friedsonman?” Mmm – no.

My journey from Friedson to Friedman didn’t begin on my wedding day or even on the day I met David – my husband-to-be. Nope, it started in the fifth grade in music class. Mrs. Armstrong was in the middle of roll-call on our first day of school, and she went through the names…”Chris Felton – ‘here’, Danny Friedman – ‘here’, Rachel Friedman – ‘it’s Friedson, here’.” While the teacher moved on, calling for Andre Goosby, the class tuned her out and began asking Danny and I when we got married (read: “Rachel and Danny sitting in a tree…”).

After eight years of seeing Danny Friedman at the locker adjacent to mine, I couldn’t wait for my college days, when I could be Friedman-free, and people might actually get my name right. But alas, my professors somehow knew to misread my name, and around that same time, I met David, an AEPi with enough confidence to fill a room (more like a building) and the good looks and personality to back it up.

By the time I found out his last name, I was already head over heels, and there was no turning back. Once the word got out that I was dating a Friedman, my friends would respond to the inevitable mispronunciations with “not yet!” before I could even correct them.

Fast forward four years: the Friedson-Friedman wedding blow-out was filled with melt-in-your mouth lemon cake with buttermilk frosting, quite a bit of alcohol, a little bit of hora and several speeches filled with giggles over how great it is that I’ll only have to change two letters – my signature won’t change, my monogram is the same, and yes – I’m going from a son to a man. Our little Rachel is growing up, both literally as she takes this huge new step into adulthood and of course, the name upgrade.

After a year and a half of marriage, I’ve accepted that I’ve gone from a relatively unique ‘Rachel Friedson’ to being one of the 134 Rachel Friedmans on Facebook. Anyone with a distant relative carrying the Friedman surname thinks we may be related, and my last name is correctly pronounced almost every time. I even moved up in the alphabet a teeny bit.

But I can tell you this: I have learned to love being Rachel Friedman, because I picked a wonderful Friedman to love.

Rachel Friedman is a Contributing Blogger to Oy!Chicago where this story was originally published.