Names are important. I have been an obsessive collector of names for as long as I can remember. As a child, I named everything. Every one of my animals and dolls had a name (and a personality to go with it). So, when it came time for Brett and I to marry, I had a hard time parting with mine – name that is, the personality is pretty well nailed down. My name had been my own for 26 years at that point. Many of those 26 years I spent working through my identity issues, feeling uncomfortable in my name – like it didn't fit me – and then coming into myself in my early 20s and embracing my name as my own. I couldn't fathom suddenly having a new one.
Early in our relationship, very early, Brett and I had gone out to the clubs with a bunch of my friends. (For them to approve of my new beau, of course.) After bar-close we all hopped in a cab and headed to Uptown to our favorite diner for eggs. Mmm... the memory of that greasy smell mixed with cigarette smoke and alcohol still stings my nostrils. We ended up shoulder to shoulder with a table of two men, who we quickly engaged in conversation. They were a couple and had been for years. They were taken with our burgeoning relationship and chatted openly about how to "make it work". By the end of the conversation, we were exchanging names and emails to get together for brunch at a later date. When the younger of the two, a professional go-go dancer by trade, saw our names, he looked meaningfully at us and said, "Sauer and Hudoba? When you get married you simply MUST hyphenate!" We laughed. We were still counting our relationship in weeks and couldn't imagine getting married. More so, we couldn't imagine being saddled with a mouthful of a name like, "Sauer-Hudoba"!
When we did get married, we mutually decided to keep our individual names. It was not a big deal to either of us, though we have discovered it can be a big deal to some. Eventually, we found ourselves welcoming children into the mix. We worked extremely hard to come up with unique and interesting, but solid names for our both of our sons. I spent literally months researching in books, online databases and blogs. (One of my favorites, The Baby Name Wizard, is a wealth of knowledge.) But what would be their last name? We puzzled for a while before recalling the go-go dancer's prophetic declaration, we "simply MUST hyphenate!" So, the first Sauer-Hudoba was born in 2006. Urban Maxwell. We chose his middle name specifically because it could be used as a last name some day. We know that Sauer-Hudoba would not look great on a book jacket or up in lights. Ha!
When number 2 came, we knew his middle name would serve last name duty too, if he so chose. I knew this little man would be the opposite of his brother from the start. Urban is a blond-haired, blue-eyed fireball. Even in the womb, baby #2 was mellower. When he came out olive skinned with dark hair and eyes, I was not shocked in the least. We chose Beringer Tate (outdoorsman, happy) because it is a counterpoint to Urban Maxwell (city-dweller, full of goodness).
Now, in 2011, we refer to our family collectively as the Sauer-Hudobas. (Sauer, a German word, can mean angry. And Hudoba, anglicised from the original Polish Chudoba, means cattle.) So, our family of "mad cows" just keeps pulling more people in. Be warned, we are poising to take over the world! OK, just a little square of world in Bloomington, but still... It's only in the best possible way.
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