Why don't I have a middle name?

As we all know children are sponges that absorb all the things around them.  I already noticed when I was in Grade 1 that I was different from the other children.  Why?  Because they all had a middle name.

My teachers would always make a big point that I didn’t have a middle name.  Even visiting assessors who made us write all kinds of exams would put pressure on me to put something in for the middle assuming that I was mentally deficient sinceI didn’t know my middle name.  Jeanette and I used to talk about it and eventually we went to my parents and asked them why didn’t we girls have a middle name when all three boys did.  The explanation wasn’t satisfactory.  Danish people generally don’t have middle names, the boys got them because the first one had the name Jens and my father decided all of them would have that as a first name (rather like many Italian and French girls having the name Maria first and then a second name).  It was because Peter and Erik were born in Canada so my parents wanted to give them a Danish identity.

            Naturally Jeanette and I weren’t satisfied with that answer so eventually my father came up with a solution.  We could assume a middle name by assuming our birth month name.  Jeanette May and Susanne June.  It seemed like a good idea when he suggested it to us and we used it a couple of times but the time came when the pressure had gone .  By junior high they didn’t care any longer if I had a middle name or not so I entered as plain old Susanne again.

            In Denmark there are few middle names in our generation or older.  However there are a number of hyphenated names such as Jens-Ole, Anne-Lise (or Annelise), Ingemarie, Hans-Ove and so on.  Interestingly enough Norwegians frequently have double names (no hyphen) and they are used as a matter of course because there are a limited amount of names in Norwegian (apparently). 

            Names are very important in the evolution of personality, or so it is suggested.  Would Cary Grant still have been debonair as Archie Leach?  Would Doris Day still have been adorable as Doris Kappelkoff?  John Wayne as tough with the name Marion Morrison?  We’ll never know for sure but certainly the stage names are attractive. 

            Who needs a middle name when there are icons such as Elvis, Cher and Madonna?  They didn’t even need a last name!