Whose Name Will Baby Take?

The Name Game

Most parents-to-be obsess about what to name the baby. For my husband and me, the hard question was what to call ourselves. The answer we came up with last fall, soon after I got pregnant, wasn't popular with my in-laws. Bill and I thought we'd start using my pen name -- Balmain -- as our legal surname. "But why?" his parents moaned.

After all, Bill and I had spent nine years of marriage going by different surnames. This not only suited our feminist beliefs, it also followed our policy of separate-but-equal. We've had separate-but-equal cars, separate-but-equal bookshelves, and even -- at our wedding -- separate-but-equal cakes (carrot for him, devil's food for me).

We knew, though, that a baby was not like a car or a cake. This child would be ours. We were confident that a unifying name would help us feel more like a family -- and look like one. After all, who wants to confuse their kid's teachers and doctors by using names that don't match?

The Name Game

Bill and I agreed that hyphenating our surnames wasn't the answer. What if our hyphenated child should, upon marriage to a hyphenated fiance, decide to hyphenate? And what if our grandchildren and great grandchildren followed suit? The mathematical consequences were mind-boggling.

We also ruled out sharing one of our given surnames. Unlike Bill, I didn't have an Irish bone in my body, and I couldn't pretend to be a FitzPatrick, like him. He felt just as funny adopting my Eastern-European "Weiner." And crossbreeding our names was out of the question: Fitzweiner, Weinpatrick, Fitzweinick -- all seemed sure to turn our kid into bully bait.

So we decided on the ethically neutral Balmain, my middle name, which I'd been using professionally. We kissed. It was settled. Soon, we vowed, we would legally become a family of Balmains. I looked forward to telling Ms. magazine and the National Organization of Women about our enlightened move. Who knew? Maybe they would throw us a ticker-tape parade?