Chosing My Own Name

When I got married to my wonderful husband I really didn't want to take his last name. As a die hard feminist it just seemed wrong for lots of reasons. But the problem was that I needed to get rid of my maiden name. 

While my mother is a train wreck, my father is just as bad, perhaps even worse (the jury's still out on that). So there was no way in hell I was keeping that last name any longer than humanly possible.

I got married fairly young because you can't schedule when you meet your soul mate and when that happens it makes sense to marry them eventually. So I hadn't really had an opportunity to change my name beforehand.

I was just going to change my name randomly to whatever struck my fancy when my fiancée pointed out that it was kind of insulting of me to choose any name but his. So he had the idea that I take his name until I came up with one that I wanted. It was a good plan, so I agreed.

I took his last name for 4 years before I finally figured out the one that I would want. I over think everything and the name I would have for the rest of my life and share with my children was no different.

I spent the four years learning about myself and doing research on all sorts of things I found interesting. My heritage is Swedish and I love the Nordic Folklore so I started to focus on that. I really like the stories of the Mother-Goddess Freyja where she leads the Valkyries and drives a chariot driven by cats really sealed the deal.  I love thinking about swooping down to the fields after a battle with the winged Valkyries in my wake swooping up the dead warriors and carrying them off to Valhalla.

I wasn't going to take the name Freyja as my last name because that just seemed pretentious and I wanted something that would actually be a last name. I was reading about Leif Erikson and saw that his sister's last name was Freydis and Frey being another Norse god I got the idea that Freyjadis would be a potential last name for me.

Being the complete loon that I am I had to do even more research and when I felt like I'd exhausted the research I could do on my own I called an Ancient Norse Language Scholar at Stanford to ask him some questions. This must have been the weirdest conversation this man had ever had that was tangentially related to his scholarly work.

He was very kind and answered my questions about what the -dis attached to a god or goddesses name meant and why one would do that. It turns out that it means 'follower of' but that had transitioned over time to simply being a last name. Freyja had meant Lady in medieval times and Frey had meant Lord so the terms were kind of normal-ish.

He confirmed that it was an unusual name, but nothing that would be insulting or off-putting.

I wanted to make sure that my new last name wouldn't be weird if I went to Sweden. I didn't want the Swedes to think I'd lost my mind simply by seeing my last name. I would let them get to know me first.

So that was it. Since I had used my husband's last name for so long I started out by hyphenating his last name with my new last name and I had my name legally changed. When my kids were born they were given both last names and my husband has honored my changing my name to my new made up name and never batted an eye.

I like that my name honors my Viking heritage even if they let me down in the parenting department.