Your first pet + the street you grew up on = your new name

A friend of mine is a great writer, and has been struggling with a pen name for months now. Concerned that her married name sounded a little too much like a name brand flour company, she had kicked around a couple of pen names. Names inspired from everything from dead relatives to characters in the Batman and Robin movie.
This last week while working on her new book, she wrote a scene where a sexually repressed woman purchased her first vibrator. It was hilarious. She commented she would have to use her pen name (which she still has not settled on) because her grandmother reads her books.
This is a problem I don't have. Coming from a family who are to books what acid is to flesh (It Burns!), I don't have to worry about this. My family does not read my blog, nor would they read any books I might publish someday. (Don't believe me? Fuck, Fuck, Fuck. There. No one who's mother carries a pistol to church would ever dare to write that unless they were certain she wasn't reading it.)
What I found the most unbelievable, and I mentioned this to my friend, is she is a woman with two children. It is clear that she has sex. So why is she afraid for her grandmother to be alerted to the fact that she is sexually knowledgeable, especially since anyone in this day and age can be sexually knowledgeable (God Bless You Internet). Well, as my friend pointed out to me, "There is knowing, and there is Knowing. And as far as my parents and grandparents are concerned, my children were made in test tubes."
Fine. The other thing I found interesting is that we are 30 years old and still concerned about what our families think? When is that going to stop? Will it ever stop? Am I ever going to get to the point where I stop worrying that my mother will see my tattoo?
The only reason I am confident in my work is because I know that my parents will never see it, and I try not to think about other people seeing it. Its like being on live television and pretending there are not millions of people watching. When writers get caught up in the idea that someone is sitting over their shoulder reading their work it makes them nervous and self-censor. That's why we have pen names.