What's In A Name

When I met my husband, he was in the Navy. I had just come out of a relationship and he was getting ready to leave for another duty station. We were not going to fall in love. We were just gonna date. Clearly, I could not fall in love with a Navy man – they wear bell bottoms – ewww!

But, fell in love we did - bell bottoms and all.

When it came time to get married he said to me something to the effect that he wanted to take my last name. We would have been Mr. & Mrs. Graves. But I was young and told him that his name was fine and I would take his.

By the way, his last name was YAUCH (pronounced yowk).

It wasn’t long after we got married that I understood. If I dropped of film to be developed, (this was before digital cameras) it was always under the W’s. Mail would come to Melissa Yanch. Most people would pronounce it as yuck.
12 Years into our marriage, Scott came to me and said, he wanted to legally change our last name. So I researched how to do it and started the process. But, we had to decide on a name and it had to be one that all three of us agreed on.

And so it began.

I told Scott that we didn’t have any guts if we didn’t change it to Smith. Then I thought we should put it up to the highest bidder on E-Bay. But Scott was afraid we would have to change our name to something like poop.

My mom wanted us to take something from her side of the family.

Courtney wanted to change her first name too, but we told her that was not an option.

Scott was thinking Pearson. I was not thinking Pearson.

So we sat and went over all of the last names of this family and decided to take his mother’s maiden name of Coleman. We stayed with his side of the family, but it was a name that John Q. Public could pronounce.

When we went before the judge, he asked us why we wanted to change our name. Scott looked him dead in the eye and said “Dude, it is Yauch. Coleman is much easier.”

So for $60.00 per person, we are now the Colemans.

And that is why you see so many names when you look me up on Facebook. I am not divorced. I am not in the witness protection program. I am just something that is now pronounceable.