Notes on a name

Kathleen Bridget Claire O'(redacted for "privacy")

As the story goes, I was supposed to be Bridget Kathleen. That is what my mom wanted, but my dad apparently won the naming war. I guess if I would have been Bridget Kathleen, the typo in my senior yearbook would have made my name Bridget Athleen, rather than Kathleen Ridget.
Now let's get to Claire, my confirmation name. If you know me, Claire just doesn't seem to fit. Please allow me to explain. Before confirmation, we had to write a paper explaining why we had chosen our name. I found a St. Clare and a St. Claire. Now St. Clare was saintly, apparently, from birth. St. Claire, however, didn't turn saintly until she was 33. Easy choice. I figured choosing St. Claire would give me the freedom of screwing up for another 20 years. A pretty forward-thinking plan for an eighth-grader, I think. (Odd thing is, I just Googled St. Claire and came up empty. Guess my eighth-grade research was a little flawed.)
O' -- I love my last name, I really do. But unless you've lived with an apostrophe in your last name, you can't understand what trouble that little ' can cause. My God, we can put a man on the moon, but we can't figure out how to make computers -- and I mean ALL computers -- deal with a freakin' apostrophe. Try ordering most anything online with an apostrophe in your last name and you get a pesky note that no "special characters" are allowed. But if I go to CVS to pick up a prescription, they can't find me in the computer unless they enter the apostrophe. I'll look at it this way ... having that apostrophe is my little cross to bear in life -- maybe not good enough to make me as saintly as St. Clare, but, c'mon, close enough. Right?