‘MacTavish’ is a right noble name.  It’s got the clout of a HIghland clan, and the stoutness that comes with healthy peasant genes.  I gave this name up to take the name ‘Huntress,’ which is being daughtered out.

See, my fair wife comes from a clan that has lots of daughters.  The Huntress clan, it should be noted, ruled the Isle of Mann as a matriarchy for 300 years.  So matrilinealism is not foreign to the name.

Not having a strong connection to my own side of the family, after Indilea was born, I decided to pass the Huntress name on to them.  After a year, I found myself faced with creating the complications of a two surname household.

A simple solution would have been to hyphenate.  But I’ll be honest, I think hyphenated last names are tacky.

So I opted to be secure enough in my own masculinity to take my wife’s last name.

(Women, by the way, think this is incredibly cool of me.  Men sometimes think I’m a douche.  But few of those men have the balls to leap off a three story building, and none of them have the privilege of going home to a wife as hot as mine.  So there.)

I kept MacTavish as a middle name, and when it crops up on documents or old profiles, whenever I am asked about it, I refer to it as my ‘bachelor’ name.  The male’s equivalent of the ‘maiden name,’ the name I had before I married into another clan.

This will cause further complications when I go to Costa Rica, where two last names are, ironically, the norm. From what I understand, your mother’s surname and your father’s surname, in that order, make your own last name…sometimes. Some systems catalogue people by their first last name, and others by their last last name. So it seems I will not end up being free of the complication, after all.

My own children will endure more confusion in their records, since their names are reversed. (They each have MacTavish as a middle name, and Huntress as a last name, opposite of Tico custom.)