As with any type of parenting, you often get blindsided by oddball issues that you just don’t know how to handle. One such issue presented itself tonight, and I think I handled it all wrong!

When we adopted our children, we kept their last names as their middle names. For my son, we took his first and middle names (both short names) and made it into one hyphenated name, and left his previous last name as his middle name. I wasn’t crazy about how it sounded, but, I wanted them to have some sense of “normalcy” and at their ages (respectively 4 and 5 at the time) they were already used to the names, so to change them would be weird for them.

My daughter was another case entirely. She had a first name that was largely unused (except for medical or other official documents). So, to keep the name length manageable, because these were not two short names like her brother, we axed the first (unused) name. Her middle name, the name everyone used, including herself, became her first name, and her last name became her middle name (it differs from her brother’s), and is really a beautiful melodious name. But, I have to confess, I always hated her first name. And, while explaining the “whys” and “wherefores” of the name change to her birth mother, I found out something shocking! She hated the first name, too! My daughter’s birth father really wanted the name.

So what did I do today? Well, though my daughter never used the name, she knew it. And she often talks about it, though usually just to family. Tonight, she wanted to announce it to her friends from Bible class. I stepped in and prevented it. Her friend asked again, and I pulled my daughter aside and let her friend go on. But how could I explain why I didn’t want her to divulge the name? I just lamely explained that that was part of her life “before“, and we’re at the “after” portion of the show.

How would you have handled it?

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