Daily Prompt: What is your middle name? Does it carry any special meaning/significance?

Marie-Antoinette, Queen of France
Élisabeth Vigée Le Brun1779/1788

Before I started Kindergarten, my Mom was sitting in the kitchen having cigarettes and coffee with her friends, and out of nowhere she called me over and said,

” Never, ever,  name your kids after your friends. ”

I think from that point on she used my middle name instead of my first name and so did most of my family. So from that day on, I was ” Marie ” The exception as most of the relatives from my Mom’s side of the family- I guess they liked her friend Anita, but my Dad’s side stuck with Marie.

My brother continued to call me ” Cheetos ” and he still does. And I’m still Marie to part of the family and Anita to the other.

So which do I prefer?

Well. I don’t like Anita because of the way most people pronounce it. It sounds like they’re saying ” Uh-nee-duh ” which is just clunky and ugly.

I liked Marie better and I really embraced ‘Marie’ when I learned about the doomed Queen of France, Marie-Antoinette.

I felt sorry for her.  In my kid’s  mind she was a girl  that nobody liked and  got her head chopped off which had to have been a horrific death.

I was a Doctor Phibes fan at this time so I understood Horror and monsters and I was sure that the people who jeered and tormented her on her way to her  death and the man who  executed her by the guillotine were pretty monstrous themselves.

Normal people don’t chop off people’s heads. They don’t even consider doing something like that and when they do, they ended up in a mental hospital or jail.

When I got older, I understood her death was a political execution but I still found it a hideous way to die and what she went through really did haunt me.

How?

Until I had problems with my thyroid, I used to wear chokers. I did that after I learned that during the French Revelation, women wore them in remembrance of people who had died at the Guillotine.

The women began wearing a political dress with red ribbons around their necks as a tribute and homage to all those who were slaughtered at the guillotine. This ribbon was worn in several different ways, around the neck like a simple choker, or tied around the back and shoulders to create an X.

So that is the story of my middle name and I’m going to follow this tag because I’m interested in other people’s stories about their sometimes neglected middle names.

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