Finally Livalska
An official name change after 3.5 years and one court date
One of my favorite parts of our wedding day was the moment when Taylor and I finally revealed to friends and family the brand new name we created together.
In the weeks leading up to the wedding, we teased the idea that we both planned to take a new, joint name, but we hadn’t let anyone in on the details. Even our parents and closest friends were kept in the dark as we held our choice as a secret.
Especially because so much about weddings involves the input (and wishes and opinions and expectations) of others, this choice and this secret felt particularly meaningful because it was uniquely and entirely ours.
On the day of the wedding, as we made our way towards the end of the ceremony, our good friend and excellent officiant Reuven helped share some of our thinking around the question of last names and the meaning behind our decision. He explained to our guests that my taking of Taylor’s last name was not a given, because we didn’t want anything about our marriage to be a given or simply taken for granted. We wanted our life and our marriage to be guided by choice, thoughtful intentionality, and decisions made equitably and openly in true partnership.
Taylor and I both loved our individual names and the families and traditions they represented. We wanted to share the same last name, as a symbol of our new family and union, but there is just no graceful combination (or double-hypenation!) of our given names.
Taylor McNeice Larson — carrying his mom Terry’s maiden name (McNeice) as a testament to an incredible lineage of strong and self-assured women, including Taylor’s maternal grandmother whose husband died young and the three fierce daughters she raised on her own. Larson denotes un-missable ties (if you’ve ever seen the copy + paste genes of the Larson clan) between Taylor’s dad Randy, his four brothers and a sister, and the resulting crew of our cousins, aunts, and uncles.
Laura Lee Linder-Scholer — proudly a second-generation hyphenation, as my parents LeAnn and Bill both took this hyphenated last name at their marriage in the eighties. Growing up, apart from trying (and failing) to fit my last name on a swim cap or Speech Team sweatshirt, I loved my unique last name and the fact that our immediate family constituted the only four “Linder-Scholers” in the world. I also treasured the progressive gender equity of my parents’ choice and marriage.
Taylor and I spent the months before the wedding talking about the significance of names and making our way through a hilariously wide-ranging brainstorm of ideas and options. At some point, we discussed how it could be meaningful to choose a Swedish name, in honor of the Swedish heritage that runs through both our families.
However, Swedes historically have used a patronymic system of deriving last names from the father’s first name and adding -son or -dotter to the end, depending on the sex of the child. According to this system, we’d be Taylor Randysson and Laura Williamsdotter. LOL. This didn’t help us on any counts. Unsurprisingly, many other traditional Scandinavian surnames derive from Viking/soldier heritage and Norse mythology and translate to things like “warrior’s helmet” or “under Thor’s protection” or “brave raider.” Those definitely were not going to work for this feminist pacifist.
So we pulled up a Swedish dictionary to look at individual words. Perhaps we could use the Swedish word for “partners”? Uhhh, it’s partners. Okay, what about “family?” Familj. How about “together?” Tillsammans. What about the word for “spouse?” Make. Wouldn’t make sense in English. Not loving any of these. We had to get more creative.
Ultimately, we landed on something that felt right for us. We created an entirely new name by combining the Swedish words “liv” (life) and “älska” (to love; verb) to form the name Livalska (liv-AHL-ska). The resulting name represents both our hopes for this marriage and our commitments for this partnership: that we’ve found a love for life, and together are creating a life that we love. Plus, we both get to keep our initials.
Livalska: a love for life, a life of love.
At the very end of our wedding ceremony, Reuven announced our new last name and I still remember the split-second silence that fell over the hall as our 150 guests took in the news. It was such a joy to have this fun and meaningful reveal, and shortly afterwards, we sent guests to their travel-themed table destinations with paper airplane place-card reminders of our new name.
Our plan was to legally change our names soon after the wedding, but life unfolded in ways that we couldn’t foresee or expect (indisputably the unchosen theme of my thirties). Two weeks after our wedding, Taylor’s dad passed away suddenly and we spent the following weeks in Arizona with family and then back home distracted and distraught with grief. Less than six months later, Covid hit and paused and then backlogged county and federal services, including name changes. A year into the pandemic, I started a new job that wouldn’t let me use Livalska as a professional or working name without proof of legal change (dumb and deeply problematic for reasons related to domestic violence safety and trans rights, to name just a few).
Consequently, we’ve been living in a sort of identity limbo, using Livalska where we can (socially, and at work, for Taylor) and our legal names as required (for mail, our apartment lease, etc.). But finally, FINALLY, we were assigned a court date.
Are you aware that in Minnesota, if you’re not taking one spouse’s last name or hyphenating the two, you are required to go to court and petition a judge in order to change your name?? We were not. Did you know that this process costs upwards of $300, for just the paperwork and licenses?? Nope, we didn’t either. But here we are: now-informed and down $300.
As of May 16, 2023, we are finally and officially the Livalskas. Our moms served as our witnesses via Zoom (because apparently having two witnesses is also a state requirement, to prove that we are who we say we are…in a way that our SSN or IDs or passports ostensibly can’t?). Weird. But we’ll be celebrating (YAY!) and then changing all of our accounts and documents (GAH!) and we are so excited to make it official.
