What's your middle name? Is there a story or history behind it?
Oh, I am so thrilled to get to blog this story....
My middle name is Suzanne for two reasons. The first, and less important reason, is that I was born on Bastille Day, and my father thought it fitting to give me a recognizably French middle name. But more significantly, my middle name comes from my mother, whose middle name is also phoenetically pronounced "soo-zan".
Before I elaborate, I must explain a bit about my family background. My mother's parents are two of the hardest-working, most generous people I have ever known. They have devoted their lives, at different stages, to the protection of our country, to the education of its children, and to the assistance of those seeking to rebuild their lives in the aftermath of hurricanes, tornadoes, and other natural disasters. My grandmother was even honored by George H.W. Bush's "thousand points of light" campaign. They are capital-G Good people. They are not, however, particularly "quirky" people. They are solid Midwestern folk who have, to my knowledge, never had a funky thought in their lives...
...except when they named my mother.
Because, you see, my grandparents did not want my mother to have a boring middle name. They wanted her name to have style--panache, even. So they named my mother Candace Susan--with an accent mark. And they pronounced it "soo-zan". Many years ago, I asked my mother about the name's origins, which she could not identify. Moreover, she claimed not to know precisely where the accent mark in "Susan" belongs. Her exact words were, "I usually just put it somewhere between the 's' and the 'a.'" And then she gave an exasperated little sigh. Ever the obnoxious daughter, I pressed on: "So let me get this straight: you...do not...know for sure...how to write your own name?" And then I laughed, and eventually so did she.
My mother's unusual middle name has evidently been a bit of a sticky subject for her for some years. It is one of the reasons that all of her children have well-known, easily-spelled names that we use without nicknames. And it is why when, on July 14th, my father looked at me, his first daughter, and suggested the French moniker, she consented on one condition: that it be spelled "correctly."
My relationship with my family can only be explained through this and a thousand other little stories. Stories about how sometimes we make life harder for one another than it maybe has to be. Stories about how we occasionally succeed at making each other's lives go a little more smoothly. But mostly stories about how we find a reason to laugh about almost all of it.
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