What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?
My middle name is Danielle, which is the name I mostly go by.
It’s strange, how some parents give their kids multiple names, but choose to put the name they want to acknowledge the child by as a middle name. It has created some interesting situations for me throughout my life.
All legal documents have to use the name given on your birth certificate. Mine is Bridget Danielle. From the time I entered this world my family acknowledged me as Danielle. People who meet me get to know me as Danielle. Growing up I didn’t hear Bridget used at all.
In my teens I thought it would be cool to have a second version of myself so some people started referring to me as Bridget. Depending on who I was with or where I was, my name got switched back and forth.
And to this day both names are used. Close friends and family know me as Danielle, my middle name. If I am dealing with a doctor or specialist at the hospital I’m known as Bridget. At the pharmacy I am Bridget. At the bank I am Bridget. At home I’m called Danielle. At church I’m Danielle. On social media I am usually Danielle.
It all came to be this way when my mom found out I was going to be a girl. Mom was a teen still living with her parents when I was unexpectedly conceived. At the same time my grandparents had just been through an ordeal of their own with another child. They had been in the process of adopting a little girl named Bridget and they were near the end stages of the adoption process when the biological mother changed her mind. My grandparents were devastated. They were so set on being the parents of little Bridget. Everything was ready for them to bring her home. To them, it felt like they had lost their child. Just as if she had died.
Then my mom learns that she is having a little baby girl and my grandparents immediately wanted to name me Bridget. They were set on having a little Bridget in their lives. Mom on the other hand, wasn’t on board with this. She had her heart set on naming me Danielle, after the author she had been obsessed with at the time. You may be familiar with her … Danielle Steele. That’s where my middle name originated from.
Anyways my mother made a compromise. To make everyone happy I was named Bridget Danielle. My grandparents got their little Bridget and my mom got her little Danielle.
And I grew up confused, never knowing from one day to the next who I was supposed to be lol
Her Complex Musings 