Nicknames

Muffin. Honey. Honeybuns. Babe. Baby. The boy and I used to always mock couples who have nicknames like these for each other. We always thought it was way too cutesy for us. Individually, we didn't really have nicknames ourselves either, with friends or with significant others.

Of course, having said that, we do have names we endearingly called each other, but we would NEVER utter them in public. So they don't exist...not really. Right?

The other day, the Czar sent me an e-mail just saying hello. That part I could get over. It was surprising but not overly so. The ending was what got me. He called me a nickname that roughly translates to "cutie" in English, something he probably hasn't called me in more than 15 years.

It was a one-line e-mail, but I thought about it again and again over the next few days. A nickname is such an intimate thing in my mind, and "intimate" is not how I would describe my relationship with him.

Maybe I've already told this story here, but it just goes to show how much it's stuck with me. I think the feeling of being a "Daddy's Little Girl" is one of the sweetest dynamics of a father-daughter relationship, but it's one that I'm not familiar with. When I was very young, probably 5 or 6, I remember watching a baseball or football game with the Czar. In typical fashion, I laid my head in his lap. But this time, he told me to get up. I wasn't to sit with him that way anymore. I was too old. The effect was like road rash. It burned and it scarred, and it changed things. It was breaking ground where a huge chasm would continue to grow between us.

So when the Czar called me "cutie," it brought me back to a time where I was Daddy's Little Girl, a short-lived time but a time that did indeed exist. So it IS true. That DID happen.