My Name Change Dilemma
My current legal name as a citizen of the United States of America is Arthur Harder. It’s kind of a comical name, I suppose. Although I enjoy making people laugh and plan to do this for a living, after 16 years of experience with my current name I have still not grown accustomed to saying the name “Arthur Harder”. When calling various bill collectors and being asked for my information in order to pull up my account, I always have a split second of twinge in my belly as I regretfully spit out my full name. I then spell out the six letters “H-A-R-D-E-R”, emphasizing the “H” and the “D” because apparently people hear “Carter” or “Harter” not “Harder” because c’mon how ridiculous of a last name is that for a person to even realistically have?
And so how did I come into such a name? Well the explanation to that question is what will follow below. I have come upon a bit of a crossroads in life recently: pondering a name change. For what reasons and what my options are, continue reading. Otherwise go check FaceBook, your texts, Twitter, masturbate to videos on Youporn.com, and then go to bed, as per usual.
I was born in Kiev, Ukraine on May 27, 1990 in the early morning. Until I was 8 years old my name was Artur (R-TOUR) Olegivich (O-LEYG-E-VEECH) Volozhin (VUH-LOZS-IN). My mother, her parents, and I immigrated to Detroit, Michigan on January 25, 1994. My mom got re-married when I was 8, and we both went down to some small ass courthouse at some undisclosed location in bum-fuck, Michigan to change our names to the new man she was fucking and now married to: Harder. We took on the Harder family name. Oh the foresight was terrible here. The first date with one “John Doe” Harder was at a McDonald’s in Southfield, Michigan (a small suburb 15 minutes outside of Detroit). Right off of Greenfield Road, the fast food joint is still there to this day. Complete with a full play pen and everything. Three months after that delicious McChicken with medium fries and a soda, they get married. It’s now June 1998. I distinctly remember going around to all my teachers, telling them of my new last name. I was no longer a bastard child. Come to think of it, I would have preferred the name Arthur Snow, actually.
So there is this accepted practice in society, wherein the female and all the children take on the last name of the father. The fact that the man provides semen is apparently valued by us humans to the point where the woman completely abandons her name and takes on the male’s. To what end, I have no clue. Nowadays the females make use of hyphens and although they adopt the male’s name, they also “keep” their given family name as well. Instead of tossing aside their ancestry and adopting the male’s, they attempt to merge the two. This can lead to fun three letter acronyms for the children of these marriages, such as MJD for Maurice Jones-Drew or MCW for Michael Carter-Williams.
But back to the story. The two McDonald’s enthusiasts are married. And my name changes. And I go to school to tell my 4th grade counterparts that my name had changed from something they couldn’t pronounce, and thought sounded close to the word ‘violin’, into something easy to poke fun at: “Harder.” The teasing started right away, as it always does with douche bag young kids. A young kid from a white trash household named Andrew (whom I use to frequently buy 50cent bagels for on “50cent Bagel Fridays!”) called my name change out in math class. He started in right away, like a trained comic dressing down a drunk heckler, “Arthur HAAARRRR-DDDEEEERRRR, OOHHHHH HARDER!” The teacher let it go, as she didn’t even believe it herself, that that was my new last name.
After that class I remember standing in single file formation by the lockers outside of the class, as I was trying hard to fight back tears of embarrassment. A skinny little 8 year old girl in my class named Jennifer said that it would be okay if I cried. Mockingly. Ouch. Perhaps what added to my embarrassment was the added sadness of not being normal. Always excluded. Either I didn’t have a dad or the one I had, had given me a name that was easily made fun of. When people saw my parents together they laughed. My mom was a scant 5’2”. My step-father a bulky 6’3”. How did those two possibly fit on top of each other during sex, my classmates wondered aloud in my direction?
I never spoke of this teasing to either parent. Not that they would be able to offer any constructive feedback, even if I had expressed my emotions. They weren’t the type of parents who actually did any parenting, you see.
So that name sucks. It’s a conversation starter when you hear it, but in a bad way. One positive is it has forced me to adapt, I’m weak and of medium height/build, I cannot physically stand to fight everyone who makes fun of my name and I have zero attachment to the name itself. So I turned it into a joke. I would say the name then make fun of it myself.
My birth name, and biological father’s name, was Volozhin as mentioned above. I have no recollection of my biological father. Other than him, ya know, contributing to 50% of my DNA and pretty much being indirectly responsible for nearly every single aspect of my life, he’s irrelevant. Yeah. I have seen no pictures of him. I have no memories of spending time with him. My mother, her parents, and I moved to Northgate Apartments right off of I-696 in January 1994 and I haven’t had any contact with my father since then.
Here’s what I have cobbled together through Sherlock Holmes-esque detective work over the years:
After a particularly spirited phone call with my mother in Spring 2013, in which I called her a “lying bitch” (not one of my prouder moments as a son), a lot of the history was revealed. They were introduced through family friends. Someone was a dentist, someone had a cousin, somehow the two met. My mom was 19. He was 24. Now, I have no clue how relationships functioned in Soviet Ukraine back in the 1980s, but I am going to assume shit was repressed; and the males were extremely dominant and chauvinistic pieces of shit. My mom was bringing in a lot of fucked up psychological baggage into this relationship because her parents fucked up her self-esteem when she was just a young girl. Or something. In any case, she blames them. And I blame her for my fucked up shit! So we continue the tradition. Hopefully someday, if I’m lucky and try real hard, my kids will loathe me, too!
So they met in 1986 or thereabouts. Courtship ensued soon after. My mom tells me over the phone that he had a hot body. Thanks, mom. Oh but he was worldly, too. Knew a lot of history factoids. Hey just like me! Except everyone hates that I know about history, and it’s certainly not getting me laid. It’s the man’s history, man! Nazis were aliens, man! That’s all anyone thinks about history in 2014.
No 24 year old is worldly. We are dumb as fuck, still. I’m 24 (as of the writing of this post) and people tell me I’m smart. And yet, I’m still so incredibly stupid in pretty much every aspect of my life except for the part where I can regurgitate information I learned quickly and easily.
In any case, they dated, they fucked, they got engaged (maybe? In Soviet Ukraine, was there an engagement period wherein the girl might be swept off her feet by a charming wedding singer as she realizes the man she’s with is a self-centered douche bag?), and then finally they got married. After a year of marriage, my mother badly wanted a child. So I was born. May 27th. Only three days after my mother’s own birth day (May 24). They had been married 2 years at this point.
Now, I had only found this factoid out when I was 19, but apparently we moved to Israel for a whole year, a year after I was born. So 1991-1992 we lived in Israel. Us three. Da fuck? What a weird thing to find out at 19. My mom claims I never asked, thus she never told me. Haha. What am I supposed to say? Hey mom did we ever live anywhere totally unexpected for a bit? In fact, go confront your parents right now, everyone, ask them about the fucked up shit that happened to you before you could begin to remember things.
Also, at some point the three of us lived with my mother’s parents. Who were in their early 40s at the time. Five people in a two bedroom apartment. And the thing is, my grandfather and my father were both engineers at various manufacturing and chemical plants. In fact, my grandfather worked in the infamous Chernobyl nuclear power plant that wound up being responsible for the Chernobyl disaster. He wound up magically not working that day. My mother recollected how she was taking a casual stroll in the park on April 26, 1986, a Saturday. A beautiful day in Kiev. One of the greatest cities in Europe. And catastrophe struck several hundred miles to the north (Kiev is located in the very middle of Ukraine, Chernobyl is towards the North and slightly West). It wasn’t until the Swedes had their nuclear radiation detection equipment go off that word spread. The nuclear power plant in Sweden that detected the Chernobyl disaster radiation was over 1,000 kilometers from the original accident area. Insane. Two days after the disaster, the government announced that “something” went wrong during a test run and an accident happened. It took a total of 20 seconds to announce this, on a nightly newscast. Disgusting. But I could go on for ages about this disaster. The point is that, if the winds were blowing differently on that day, millions of people would have had their lives altered, my mother most likely included. That’s a bit dramatic, but true, and that very knowledge makes living life all that much more fun!
Crazy historical events aside, my original point was that my biological father was somehow educated but poor. My grandfather has pointed out to me that neither my father nor he were ever in the Communist party, thus affecting the ceiling they could reach in their respective careers. So this is how the five of us ended up living together after the little jaunt to Israel ended in 1992. Apparently my father hadn’t grown fond of the whole fathering concept by this point. He was always ready to yell and turn to anger when he was at home, according to my mom. He never physically abused me nor my mother, to my knowledge, but it wasn’t a happy home regardless. And cramped. Square footage and personal space can be key, and we had neither.
So although I’m not a fan of my mother’s judgment in general, due to the evidence I have to go on after 24 years of observing said judgments, I am going to assume this dude fucked up quite a bit and drove her away less than two years after returning from Israel. According to her, she always pictured a life in America for our family, and maybe it was as simple as him disagreeing with that vision. I would later learn he eventually found a life somewhere in Germany, although he sired no other children. Extremely vague information once again.
Apparently my father had reached out to…someone, and that someone contacted my mom around the time of my 22nd birthday in May 2012, right as I had made the commitment to move to Los Angeles from East Lansing. My father wanted to fly me out to somewhere vaguely in Germany and voice his disappointment in me. Or just to meet me. I don’t know. But I didn’t go for it. The information was sprung on me a week before my flight to LA. The news made me immediately fill with rage and anger. Fuck him for trying this third party bull shit. Hit me up on Facebook. Or fucking find out my number from the third party relative you contacted. I don’t know. In any case, I had zero desire to go and shot down any further conversations on the topic. And so I flew out to LA a week following that bit of news and haven’t heard a peep from dear old dad in the two years since.
The name Harder isn’t my own and feels foreign and awkward, especially now that my mother and step-father are legally divorced. My birth name was given to me by a man who didn’t want me as a son, pretty much. So now what are my options?
Well, my mother’s parents have invested heavily in my life. Without them I’m not sure what my life would be like. Our relationship has had its share of dark turns as well, but they have definitely sacrificed a lot for my well-being. My grandmother has been the driving earning force for our family, by cleaning the houses of Orthodox Jews living in the suburbs of Detroit. My grandfather’s vision is extremely poor and his English even more troublesome, so during our time in America he’s been the loyal house husband. Always cleaning, cooking, keeping up to date on current events, and managing the finances. But the two of them have different last names. In Ukraine many couples did not adopt a common last name, and for my grandparents it was never a question. In my grandmother’s line of work her last name carried weight due to her father’s previous successes in the industry. So she kept her name and my grandfather never really questioned it, as there were no societal pressures on them to have the same last name.
So do I honor my grandfather and grab his family name? Slightly snubbing my grandmother in the process? Or vice versa? Oh and by the way, my mom thinks she was adopted so there’s that whole thing, too. My grandparents swear angrily whenever she references this theory, but who knows. None of us look like one another in the least bit.
It's now August 2014 and I have no fucking clue what to do about my last name. It would be a huge bother to change it, but at the same time I’m tired of carrying it around. I may just go back to my given birth name and try to right my father’s wrongs with my future children, if my sperm ever ends up pollinating a female’s egg.
Anyway this is your writer for this evening signing off, thanks for indulging my pathetic attempt at writing.
Feel free to follow me on Twitter:
https://twitter.com/arthur_herpderp