What’s in a Name?

They were questions from a script, boxes to check as a matter of procedure, and asked with about as much zeal as an automated attendant alerting me that my phone call may be recorded for quality assurance.

The judge asked why I wanted to change my name.
I told him I had recently married.

He asked me if it was in the best interests of the community.
I said yes it was.

He asked if I was a sex offender.
Um, that would be a hard “NO.”

He asked if I was attempting to escape debt.
No…but wait, is that a thing?!

He asked if I was otherwise attempting to hide my identity for any other nefarious purpose.
Negative.
And with that and a court order signed with more than a dash of elegant bravado, I had a newly changed (I prefer “enhanced”) last name…with a hyphen and everything.



Neither my wife or I can recall asking or being asked “the big question.”

Being that over 10 years of our conversations, from the most mundane to the most intimate, took place via text and messenger we were able to review every exchange. We relived every thumbs up and emoji, every tear of laughter and pain, every virtual high five and warm embrace, every frustration, success, sniffle, smile, grumble, and giggle.

No such question was ever asked.

There was however a gradual shift in tone as this conversation, as this life, unfolded.

As we read through our messages spanning nearly as many years as this technology has existed, we came to understand that these were words not spoken between friends who at some point “fell in love.”

Somewhere along the way we simply came to understand what I am now certain has always been the case: I am hers. She is mine. We are Us.

There was no planning, no “ifs” and very few mentions of “when.”

There was no need to propose the idea of spending our lives together. Such an obvious concept required as much acknowledgement or debate as gravity or our need for oxygen.

No dowry was requested.
No honeymoon plans were made.
Dresses and tuxedos? Not even in an incognito browser tab.

No consideration was ever given to seating arrangements or even guests for that matter.

Instead, as things progressed, our discussions involved practical matters like zip codes and health insurance, meal planning and schedules.

Of course, one of the biggest changes was kissing. (Man, why didn’t we think of that in high school?!)

The reality is we were already sharing our lives, side by side, intimately bound. We always had been and as such we found little in the way of either of us making the decision to marry. It was just a given. Everything else is just details.

And so, we got married. 

From Here on Out….

Kristin Benninghoff is a name that has been locked in my mind and heart for over 25 years. Never once has Kristin ever been just “Kristin.”

“Well, well…if it isn’t Kristin Benninghoff.”

“Hey! Kristin Benninghoff! Come here for a second.”

“I love you Kristin Benninghoff.”

One name could never be enough.

Rhythmic and unique with just the right combination of soft and hard sounds, it can carry a bite or a smirk depending on the inflection…just like her.


”KRRIIIstiin BENNNinnnggghoff!”

Of German roots, Kristin is daughter of a strong, proud, witty, and decent father who loved her with an immeasurable force. A force that is rivaled only by her love for him.

His influence, his blessings and teachings, his humor, and his love comfort and guide her and by proxy do the same for Jakob, Olivia, myself, and Oliver.

She carries her dad in that name as she does with every beat of heart and in every breath conjured by her lungs.

Like her, for whatever reason, people have always combined my first and last name. To this day there are moments in a grocery store or pub when I hear “Jaasson Becehhhrra.” It’s always an old schoolmate or teacher.

For the entirety of our relationship, despite a period of time where she supposedly had a different last name, I have only known her as Kristin Benninghoff. I have no concept of her by any other name. 

I do it too. I don’t recall any time where I’ve introduced myself simply as “Jason.”

My name is Jason Becerra.

Jason R. Becerra to be perfectly clear.

The “R” is a big deal.

Perhaps Kristin is the only other person I know who is as proud to be their father’s child.

My father is known to many people as a celebrity, a broadcaster, a writer, and singer (and more than a few other names I’ll leave out haha).

He’s a kind, decent, compassionate man who has spent a lifetime trying to help his family feel and find love, success, and joy in our own lives.

In his professional life he would work 20-hour days at 5 different places if that’s what it took. He has accomplished “success” by any metric in the broadcasting industry. He has sung to empty bars and sold-out arenas sharing the stage with legendary artists and humble anonymous musicians with equal passion. He has given voice and served as an advocate for members of our community who would otherwise have neither.

So too did he coach my pee-wee baseball team and hold court regaling my friends and I with tales of Pahokee, Florida. He bought me books, inspired me to write, bought me my first guitar, gave me my first copy of Pet Sounds, and has guided me through life one step and hug at a time. Everything I know about being a man and a father comes from my dad.

Kristin and I are who we are because of our families, because of our fathers.


Us

So, there we were: Ms. Kristin Benninghoff and Mr. Jason R. Becerra.

It works ok I suppose.

We could leave them as is but it just felt…off.

Kristin is a Benninghoff. She is no more a Becerra than she is a Peterson, Xu, Abboud, or Alperstein.

The thought of her replacing “Benninghoff” with “Becerra” seemed unfathomable. It seemed crude and sacrilege.

It was a non-starter for me.

Similarly, I cannot separate myself from my name. I share it name with my father, my mother, and my son. It’s who I am. It’s part of what binds me to my family and what helps illuminate each step I take into my own future.

So, then what?

For a moment she considered hyphenating but that didn’t feel right to me either.

Why don’t we BOTH hyphenate? Afterall, John Lennon took on Yoko’s name.

Just like that, Kristin and I had another of our many “well, duh” moments.

It makes all the sense in the world.

She was not joining the Becerra family.
I was not becoming a Benninghoff.

Our whole relationship going back to the beginning has been a blending of our lives into something new. Getting married was simply natural and obvious…like gravity and air.

We have made the choice to bring together everything our fathers and families gave us, everything that had defined us as individuals.

We are taking everything and everyone we have in our lives and sewing them together into something new (whether they like it or not ha-ha).

We give to one another every memory and moment, every good time and bad, every smile and scar, all the laughter and loss that we have ever had, shared or yet to be experienced.

All these things make us who we are…and who we are is Us.

How could we NOT have the same last name?

It became such a simple and obvious choice…. like gravity and air, and Us.

And so, we changed (enhanced) our names.

There are many layers to this notion of spouses changing or hyphenating (enhancing) their names after marriage.

Some may see my decision as a statement of sorts and discuss the idea within the political or philosophical realms. There are legal and practical aspects and certainly gender roles within society could and are being debated every day but I am not going to do any of that because none of it had anything to do with why I went to Harris County Court #310.

My name is my statement and my name is Jason R. Benninghoff-Becerra.

Be Well and Kind,
JRBB

The Story of Us

I wish I could tell you a story about our first kiss or the magic moment under a bowl of stars when fate made itself known to Us.

I wish I could paint a portrait of me brushing the hair behind her ear as she first looked at me with those eyes and that smile that change my life every time she graces me with them.

I wish I could describe the precise moment when I first heard her say “I love you” in a way I had never heard her say it before.

I wish there was some way I could capture all those fireworks and butterflies that come in the moments before that first kiss that changed our lives…the kind of kiss that changes anyone’s life really.

But I don’t have those stories to tell. Ours is not one of “new” love or of flames so passionate that their heat carried us into the sky.

Our story begins in a musty sophomore geometry classroom. We were bound together by the alphabet and its influence over Ms. Grissom’s seat assignments.  

Unencumbered by the kinds of promises kids so often make though they are too young to know they can’t keep, our friendship was instead marked by our social awkwardness, our misfit friends who inhabited the land of broken toys that was our classroom,  and shenanigans. (Well, the shenanigans were mostly mine.)

That smile continues…my hair? not so much.

She was beautiful though she won’t acknowledge it. She was funny and smart with an air of cool that again, she’ll deny. Her self-image is much different than my view of her. I suppose the same is true for me.

I was shy and insecure with a sense of fashion that could generously be described as ridiculous…except for my black trench coat. I’d like to think it was the first step in wooing My Love.

Sometimes the class clown, other times desperate to melt into the faded paint on the mid-century classroom that incubated us, I was never quite comfortable in my own skin.

She had my eye even then. She doesn’t believe me but it’s true.

Somehow despite my often crippling awkwardness I summoned the courage to write her a note. Clumsily folded with a little tag that had the word “pull” and an arrow, it was my first attempt at telling her how I feel. She denies this too but it’s my story and I’m sticking to it.

Then as now, every word was a piece of my heart.

Whenever I made my clumsy attempts at humor she would look at me with a tone in her eyes that seemed to embody both a sense of dismay and approval. She tried to keep a straight face and sometimes she managed to but more often than not that smile would not be denied.

That smile.

Through circumstances unique to adolescence we were pulled apart and lost touch despite always being in the other’s orbit.

It seemed like we were always five minutes and two miles away without even knowing it. We visited the same friends’ apartments always just missing one another. One night in particular I left our mutual friend’s house about 10 minutes before she arrived.

We didn’t even realize we knew the same people.

For a time we lived almost exactly across the street from one another.

She worked at the restaurant directly across the street from the pub I frequented. I ate at her restaurant with some regularity too. Evidently it was always her night off.
I’m serious. You can’t make this up.

For years we circled one another, never knowing just how close we were. So close yet so far away.

Enter Facebook and a simple friend request I received one afternoon.

It was Kristin Benninghoff.
I won’t even attempt to deny that my heart skipped more than a beat when I saw the “alert” nor the fact that I stared at the screen for I don’t know how long waiting to see if she would send me a direct message.

She did.

When friends reconnect after time apart they often say they “picked up where they left off.”

Kristin and I did not.

We picked up right where we were.

We slipped into one another’s life both as if we were never apart but also with all the miles, scars, tears, laughter, and experiences gained over the years we spent in orbit.

That time carved and molded us into more than just old friends catching up.

The first time I saw Kristin in person after all those years she spoke to me as if we had never spent so much as an hour apart in our entire lives.

She knew me so well, our conversation so fluid and intimate that I asked if perhaps she had reached out to my then-wife to inquire about various details.

She had not.

She just knew.

She just knew.

Since then, every step we’ve taken has been taken together.

We became inseparable despite seldom having the opportunity to even grab coffee.

We became each other’s biggest fans, boldest champions, most caring confidantes, and loving supporters.

The good, the bad, the awkward, the triumphant, the failure, the loss, the joy, this life, the universe, and everything have been experienced together.

We have spent these years supporting one another through heartache and the stress of building the lives we always envisioned but seemed unfathomable to that point.

We’ve celebrated too.

She cheered me as I performed on stages large and small alike.

I cheered every milestone achieved as she, Jakob, and Olivia moved through life.

She embraced the birth of my son with a passion and tender love that continues to humble my soul.

And together, we walked across the stage, her in Houston and I in New Hampshire, to receive our Master’s degrees. We spent the day texting back and forth as we sat waiting for our names to be called.

Graduation Day

She is the first person I want to tell about anything that happens throughout my day.

Someone cuts me off on the road? Call Kristin.

Oliver said “SEGA!!!” I must call Kristin.

Exactly how does so much laundry appear in the hamper? Kristin will know.
I’m struggling to maintain a grip on my life. Kristin can help. Kristin will understand.

Whether inconsequential or monumental, Kristin is my first instinct…and always has been.

Yet, we were never single at the same time.
Being together as we are now was never even on the radar.

Perhaps a fleeting curiosity or the proverbial “what if” would cross our individual minds but it was never outwardly acknowledged. We never spoke of such things.

What could have come of such talk or consideration?

What would the point have been?

We thought of it in the same way a child may think of what it would be like to fly but without the naivety that youth provides to allow them to believe they have wings to spread.

We were in long term relationships and we had our friendship. What more could we ask?

But things change.

Several months ago I made the very difficult decision to end my marriage after 14 years. That marriage gave birth to my darling son and taught me more than I can describe about sacrifice and compromise, about love, and about what it means to fill the measure of my creation.

It was not a decision taken lightly. There was no singular moment or action that led me to that decision but it was one that I came to believe was the only and best choice to make for the family. It was an inevitable and in many ways unfortunate choice to make but no less essential for the lives of everyone involved. As I made my way through the maze of divorce settlements and trying to reconcile my beliefs about family and individual fulfillment, I came to understand what life would look like. Maybe I’d have an apartment somewhere or maybe I’d spend time with my parents planning the next chapter of my life as a divorced father.

But then, something happened on the way to the rest of my life.

I’ll resist the temptation to frame the way Kristin and I became Us within the context of destiny though the manner in which we went from “us” to “Us” begs for such otherworldly poetry.

What I do know is that we were collecting all the photographs and memories, joyful mornings and mournful nights, wisdom and knowledge, that have all led us to this moment…to This Right Here.

They say timing is everything and I suppose it is.

We had in fact never been single at the same time.

We had in fact never spoken of any sort of life together beyond what we had always enjoyed.

And then we did.

And when you realize you want to spend the rest of your life together with somebody you want the rest of your life to start as soon as possible.

And so it has.

It’s the heart that matters more

We turned Our new life over and in doing so we found Our Love.

This is why I cannot tell you a story of a singular moment when Kristin and I became what we are today.

Our story is one of Choice.

Our story is about the choices we’ve made as both individuals and as Us.
Some of the choices we made while apart, unfortunate though some may have been, were essential in shaping us into the individuals that have become Us.

So too are the choices we made to craft the lives we wanted to live, lives we thought impossible until we had the audacity to believe in ourselves and in Us.

We made choices to earn degrees and to further our careers.

We made choices about family and faith and all the while challenging and inspiring one another as we took those steps together in hopes of building our lives. We didn’t realize it but we weren’t just building our lives.
We were building Our Life.
So too have those choices involved others.

She chose Oliver.
Oliver chose her.

Olivia chose me.
I chose Olivia.


Olivia chose Oliver.
Oliver chose Olivia.

My beating hearts

And while Jakob is already building his own life, growing into a man anyone can be both proud and humbled to know, he too made a choice.

He chose to open his mind and heart to Kristin and I and to stand with Us, his own beloved at his side when Kristin and I make the most natural and obvious choice of all: to be married.

We all chose to come together and build something new.

Our story is not defined by any one moment.

Our Life was not born in a whirlwind. There is no story of falling in love, of courtship, or dropping to one knee.

Rather, Our Life is defined by moments sewn so tightly together that I struggle to find the seams that join the separate pieces.

I’ve no concept of a life without her…not one that I would ever want to live.

God Only Knows what I’d be without her.

The fact that we are now We is a testament to, and confirmation of, what I have always known to be true but was too afraid to allow myself the chance to consider as ever being possible.

Kristin, It Had To Be You. It could not have been anyone else and I’m so glad it’s you.

Kristin you are my best friend. We Can Do Anything. We have. We will.

I love Kristin Benninghoff.

She is My Love, from Here On Out.

I love that for Us

Always and Forever and Regardless.


Be Well and Kind,
Jason