Nicknames

     Yesterday, my mom would have turned 95 years old. Five years ago, in February, however, she passed away; it sure doesn’t seem that long ago.

I’ve been thinking about sharing this story for several years, but – I don’t know. It’s a dumb story but it sure is hard to write about.

As you may know, my sister Pat and I were close friends. Over the years, we came up with lists of nicknames for each other. Snoopy for her, Woodstock for me. Which morphed into Big Nose or Beagle Nose and Little Bird. When she went off to college, they called her Duck. For a long time, she called me Knutt, because I was a goofy kid and thrived on making her laugh.

Mom also had nicknames for us. Because Pat was round and chubby, Mom would call her “Fatty Patty”. And because I was scrawny, she sometimes referred to me as “Teeny Tiny”. No clue where we got our low self-esteem from.

But actually, from day one, even though my birth certificate reads “Christine”, Mom always called me “Tina”. And everyone else back in the day called me that too.

I hated it. Even now I cringe just thinking about it.

I went to small, local schools until the fifth grade, and up until then, because everyone knew us, my teachers and my classmates called me Tina. When I entered fifth grade in the big, brick school in town, I was a newbie to the teachers and most of the kids. It was easy to ask for them to shorten my given name of Christine to Chris.

It took years for that name to stick, and occasionally even now, someone from the old days will still call me Tina.

Mom hung onto that nickname like it was a chunk of solid gold. We had a blow-up over it one time, me demanding she call me Chris and ranting to her that if she wanted to call me Tina so badly why didn’t she just name me that legally.

She wrote me a long letter (which I still have somewhere), telling me that when I came home from the hospital and was just so tiny and precious, her Teeny Tiny, she immediately adopted the alternate name. But that she would always love me with all her heart, no matter what name I went by.

Probably most kids have been tormented at one time or another by their nicknames (and by their mothers). Even my daughter went through a phase where she hated her name (more like a phase where she hated everything, but that’s the joy of being a girl).

The saying is not true that sticks and stones may break my bones but names will never hurt me. But how I ever let a simple name like Tina bother me so much, I do not know.

I do know, however, that I do not want you all to start calling me that! I just felt it was time to get this off of my chest. 

Talk about being tormented, notice the ashtray in the corner.