What's in a middle name?

As my birthday draws closer and closer with every quickly passing day, I've been thinking a lot about children and the naming process. When it comes to first names, parents don't mess around. They spend months agonizing over what moniker their child will be stuck with for the rest of her life. They argue, debate and compromise over which name will be the prettiest or best fit for the personality they want their child to develop.

Certain names get ruled out for cruel nickname potential during childhood, and others get ruled out because they just wouldn't work with the child's last name. Let's face it: Samuel is a great name for a boy, but not if his last name is Adams.

From the way my mother tells it, she and my father had narrowed their choices down to Moonchild and Dana shortly before my birth. From the name options my parents considered, the choices seemed too disparate to find a happy medium. Cortney just happened to come up one day, and it was the only name they could agree upon. No offense to my mother (who pushed for Moonchild), but I think I ended up with an alright name to get me through life.

Mattel debuted "Courtney," Barbie's kid sister in the mid 1980's. Thankfully, this shorter, chubbier, easier-to-dress version of Barbie quickly disappeared; although for awhile I considered "Courtney" to be a metaphor for my life when my kid sister got all the looks.

I was also terribly jealous of the other little girls with conventionally spelled names. They got to buy name pencils and name stickers with their names actually spelled right.

As I grew older, though, I realized not too many other people share my name. The Cortneys that do exist seem to be creative and intelligent individuals like the poet Cortney Davis, and I'm proud to be counted among their ranks.

Middle names, on the other hand, are a whole different ball game. Most people experience mild embarrassment when asked to reveal their middle names, and for good reason with some of the middle name stories I've been told.

Often, old fashioned names like Millicent and Francis get sandwiched between the more currently aesthetic first and last names in memory of some long lost relative. Other times, the mother's maiden name becomes the middle name of the child to preserve family history, but the result isn't always pleasant to the ears.

Middle names sometimes come from the emotional whim of a parent too saavy to stick the kid with a goofy first name but too sentimental to give the name up entirely. I knew a gentleman named after a star whose first name sounded normal enough, but his middle name came from the star's constellation.

Sometimes the middle name isn't terrible, but the story behind it is embarrassing. For example, my boyfriend's middle name comes from his parents' fascination with Eric the Red, the Viking who discovered Greenland and fathered Leif Ericson, discoverer of North America. Strange but true, I suppose.

Mine falls into that last category of middle names given for strange reasons. I was born right after the Dallas cliffhanger in that strange period of time when everyone ran around debating who shot J.R. My mildly clairvoyant mother knew in her heart of hearts that Kristen shot J.R. no matter what anyone else said, and that is how I got my middle name. Perhaps because mine has such a unique story behind it, I'm fascinated with the idea of whole extra name given to a child just for the heck of it. It says something about our culture, I think.

No matter how practical and focused on appearances we seem to be, there's still room to play and act on whimsical notions. My cats don't have middle names because it doesn't seem right to saddle an animal with a name too long for its peanut-sized brain to remember. I'm considering the possibility of a child someday with less enthusiasm than most, but it might be worth it—as long as I get to choose the middle name.