Carl Abramson and Kim Sarubbi and their three children. Credit: Sabr family
When it comes to child-naming, parents often compromise, sometimes hyphenate, or take one parent’s name. Even less common, some decide to create an entirely new surname. For a Brentwood couple, that last option is pitting personal choice against state law.
Kim Sarubbi says her husband rarely gets fired up about things. But recently, that changed when the last name of the couple’s newborn became a point of dispute with the state.
Why all the fuss? A three-decade-old Tennessee law won’t let the family name their child what they want to name him, and the attorney general even issued an opinion confirming what the family has been told elsewhere: name-fusing is not allowed in the state.
Sarubbi, who runs a digital consulting firm, and her husband Carl Abramson, a chiropractor, are a mild-mannered couple who moved to Nashville from Santa Monica.
Their first two kids were born in other states, and they were given the blended last name Sabr.
“We said, all right, if we take the first three letters of each of our names a-b-r and s-a-r, it perfectly combines to S-a-b-r. Sabr,” Abramson said.
Kim Sarubbi chimed in: “That’s a great alternative because I don’t want to change my name. I don’t think it’s fair for all of them to have my last name, even though I’m pushing them out,” she says with a chuckle. “But, you know, it’s a great compromise.”
The Sabr family casserole dish. Credit: Kim Sarubbi
They admit it’s pretty unconventional, and it’s had some unintended consequences.
For instance, they once got held up at airport security. Sabr comes from Arabic, and someone on the no-fly list had her same name.
Airport security officials let them through when they introduced them to their six-month-old daughter.
Back in California, though, nobody second-guessed them.
“So with the first two, there was never an issue. It wasn’t even a thought. We figured, ‘oh, we can name our children whatever we want.’”
Which is true in some states. But not in Tennessee. They only discovered this when their third child, Camden, was born.
They recall a nurse scratching out Sabr from an official birth document. “We get a call from Vital Records. And they say, ‘sorry, you cannot choose that name,’” Abramson said.
This comes despite their Sabr door mat, Sabr inscribed on their cookware, and the fact that they sign holiday cards “the Sabr family.”
Vital Records officials point to a law from the ‘70s that’s become the Sabrs’ worst enemy.
In his office in the basement of the state capitol, Eddie Weeks, the state’s law librarian, pulled down a book of Tennessee code.
“Which makes it point-blank clear that, no, you cannot combine two names in any way other than the whole last name of both parents, or either surname of either parent.”
The law, in the view of Abramson, “makes no sense,” he said. “According to law, we can change our names to whatever we want. We just can’t assign the name.”
A collage of Camden Sabr, although that’s not yet his legal last name. Credit: Sabr family
To be sure, it would’ve been much less trouble to go to court and change the baby’s last name. But the outrage they feel over not being able choose a name has turned them into accidental activists.
They’re said they’re fighting on principle –- hoping to clear the way for other Sabrs out there.
Laura Carpenter, a sociology professor at Vanderbilt University, said people have been calling last-name-meshing a trend for decades. But it’s usually just a few isolated examples.
“Genealogists are going to go crazy if everyone makes up a last name — it would be as if everybody was in witness protection, somehow,” she said.
Still, hybrid-izing, she said, could start gaining traction. Families in the 21-century just think differently about their surnames and what they represent.
“Hybridization is perhaps a reaction to finding hyphenation too frustrating or confusing or so long they don’t fit on an NFL jersey,” Carpenter said. ”
Another possible driver: it’s a nod to the messiness and complexity of many household situations.
“Passing on last names could be becoming less important as divorce is becoming more common and people grow up in families with three or four different last names – and that’s not uncommon,” she said. “And women who have professional trajectories that are just as important as male professional trajectories.”
Since many popular last names derive from an ancestral occupation — Baker, Smith, Miller — Carpenter wonders what would happen if that logic had a contemporary application.
“We might also speculate about the possibility of new last names that reflect new occupations that didn’t exist when we have the names that we mostly use now. So, Fred Computer Programmer marries Allison Clinical Psychologist,” she said. “In which case I would be Laura Vanderbilt University.”
Carl Abramson, meanwhile, is considering suing, in an effort to change state law.
It’s perhaps fitting that, in Arabic, Sabr means “patience.”
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