With seven months to go until the wedding, I'm really getting excited that in about half a year from now BK will be my husband. But that also means there are only 227 more days I'll get to spend with my father's last name.

The whole name change is something I've been thinking about for a while now. But it really hit me this morning that I don't have much time left as Melissa Brooks.

So at the risk of sounding dramatic, I guess you could say I've gone into early mourning over the inevitable loss of my surname.

No one is forcing me to comply with this social convention in which a woman traditionally drops her surname and takes on her husband's when she marries. But for me, it's not about not wanting to take his name -- it's about not wanting to lose mine in the process.

In a few weeks I'll have lived 27 years as a Brooks. After all of this time, it almost seems unnatural to suddenly begin answering to a last name different from the one stamped on my birth certificate.

Of course the actual name change is a bothersome process that requires getting a new driver's license, passport and credit cards. Not to mention changing subscriptions, memberships, e-mail addresses. But I'm not even talking about this aspect of it.

What's been bothering me about the name change is how psychologically and emotionally tough it will be to accept a new name as my identity.

If I change my name, I lose a little bit of myself, of my connection to my ancestry. I become a Brooks in parentheses on the family tree.

I'm kinda attached to my name. It's clean, simple -- I really quite like it. As a "B," I was always one of the first to be called on when teachers took attendance. It's the name my parents cheered for when I graduated from North Penn High School, and then from Pennsylvania State University. It's the name my grandmom loves seeing in print every week.

And it's the name that's sparked many nicknames. All my life I've been Mel Brooks. Brooksie and "Our Miss Brooks" to a few teachers. MAB (and crazy variations of my initials, e.g., Mabs, Mabster, Mabella) to friends.

If assuming my husband's name is a symbol of allegiance to him, to our new life together as a unit, then what happens to my former life as M. Brooks? As I make the transition from a one-syllable name to three syllables, will I ever again be called Mel Brooks?

I'm not calling for gender equality in the surname game. I'm not one of those women who thinks, "Well, why shouldn't he take my name?" Or, "Let's meet half way and mutate our names together!" Nor do I want to become the law offices of Brooks and Kukulka.

So to be clear, I am making the change. But I will not downplay how difficult it will be. I think it's a big change, one worth recognizing. And for me, an over-analytical and often sentimental person, it's something I have to work out with myself. Just writing about it is helping me to do that.

While changing my last name raises the question of what a new name means in terms of my identity, not changing it would cause me to question, "How am I connected to my future -- my children and grandchildren?"

In the end, having the same name as my future kiddies is more important to me than clinging onto a name I know is -- and will always be -- very much a part of me, whether it's still legally mine or not.

This afternoon I decided to Google my soon-to-be last name (surprisingly I haven't done this before). I knew it was Polish. I discovered it's also a small settlement in Poland. Really small, as in population: 30.

My first name means honey bee in Greek, and today I learned my new Polish last name translates to cuckoo, as in the common cuckoo bird. Kukulka is also the name of a Polish candy.