I was calling up to my daughter this morning, to tell her breakfast was ready, and it struck me that I never in a million years would have predicted that I would end up using the nickname I most often do. 

One of the reasons I fell in love with her name is because it had an abundance of nickname choices. I didn’t love one of the nicknames – the most common one – because it seems to be fairly common overall, both as a nickname for her name… but also as a nickname for other names… or even as a name by itself. But her name was in our family tree, and my husband and I both loved it, and it had ALL those other nickname possibilities… and I had fallen in love with one of the (lesser used) nicknames in particular. 

Let’s say, for example’s sake, that her given name is Carla (which it is not), and I had been sure, just sure that I would call her LaLa. But instead, I almost exclusively call her Carly – the very common nickname I had wrinkled my nose at early on. 

It really is so funny how naming works. Because now that “Carly” is inextricably associated with my darling child, I love it. 

A couple of times, I have given LaLa a go, just to see what would happen. (Carla is fine with this; she seems to find it sort of novel, that I had planned to call her LaLa.) But not only does LaLa seem very separate from Carla-the-person, it feels odd in my mouth.

I also love that her friends have come up with their own separate nickname for her: Cars. It’s so cute, and I never would have imagined it when I was choosing her name. Sometimes I call her Car, sure, but Cars seems different in a way that I find so charming. Well. Perhaps you’d have to be here, in my brain, to see it. 

Who knows why we never gave LaLa a fair shake from the beginning. Probably it’s because we refer to Carla, 90% of the time, as Carla. I use the Carly nickname a lot more these days than I ever have before; perhaps I am getting lazy in my decrepitude.

Oh! One unforeseen benefit of going with Carly over LaLa: One of the dogs down the street is LaLa. The dog is only a few years old, so I’m guessing that if we had gone with LaLa, the neighbors would have chosen something else. But maybe not! 

Did you have a nickname growing up? Do you now? I’ve had a couple over the years. My parents planned a nickname for me, based on squishing part of my first name together with a common nickname for my middle name. That sounds really weird when I can’t just share it with you, but that’s how they came up with it. They LOVED it. In fact, I think I even went by that name for some time. But – and I remember the event clearly, even if I can’t remember at all how old I was – I was enrolled in ski school at some ski resort when I was little, and someone mispronounced my nickname in such a horrid, detestable way that I immediately and vehemently refused to answer to that name ever again.

Later on, in high school, a couple of kids called me Susie. But it was irregular and there were only a few specific people who did so. I never introduced myself as Susie or anything. 

In college, one of my beloved roommates started calling me Suz, which stuck. That’s how I began referring to myself. My mom and my husband and a handful of other people (almost exclusively college friends) still call me that today. Aside from that, my husband doesn’t use any nicknames for me. Sometimes he’ll call me “Babe.” But that’s it. 

Once college ended, I went back to using my full name at work and when I met people. So most people just call me by my full first name. 

The lack of nicknames almost makes a little wistful, I guess, because I am a very nickname-y person (though I try not to be annoying about it). Obviously, if you don’t like a nickname, I will refer to you by whatever name you choose. But I tend to have multiple endearments for my nearest and dearest. As I said earlier, I refer to Carla as Carly (most often), and then Car, and then C, but I also call her Little Cat or Kitten (because she used to make a purring sound after she drank milk when she was an infant) or Honey Bun or Cutey Patootie or Sweetheart or whatever strikes my fancy in the moment. I have a variety of sobriquets for my husband. I even still call my brother by his childhood nickname, which I am sure he LOVES (but he has never bristled or asked me to stop).