Pet name for son misappropriated as a nick name

[EmptyCoffeeCup0849]

Hi ladies,

This is a little tongue in cheek, and totally first world problem, but it does ever so slightly bother me, so was wondering if I could have your advice.

My baby boy's name is Charlie. For a while I had, what I thought was, my own sweet little pet name for him of 'Char Char'. I never envisaged I would share this with other people for them to adopt it as a nickname but...my husband decided to copy me, now his whole family have started calling him Char Char and I hate it! It really grates on me. Because A, that was my little pet name for him they have stolen, and B because I've never given them permission to shorten his name or told them that that is his nickname that we're calling him.

Sooo can anyone out there relate to me? Do you have any advice of how I deal with this? I'm just swallowing it for the moment as I have no idea of how to tell them to stop without sounding majorly rude or petty.

Thanks in advance!

Is your surname Binks?

Get it patented or trademarked.

😂😂@ binks!

Char char is awful, Charlie is a great name

Maybe they think that's what you are calling him? Go back to Charlie in front of them and they will switch back too.

You never gave them permission

They've heard you calling him it and think that's what you call him... Do you ask people's mother's permission to use nicknames normally?

Char char does sound silly though, perhaps stop calling him that yourself and hope they follow suit before he's old enough to introduce himself as that at preschool and be char char for life...

Never given permission to shorten his name though.

Good Lord...

If they've heard you call him that then they probably expect you don't mind him being called that? Not sure I understand the difference between a pet name and a nickname tbh, and you risk coming across ever so slightly pfb.

Hard as it may seem, unfortunately you don't get to have a personal nick name for your son that no one else in the family can use. Life's just not like that.

However, I wonder if you are focussing on this, because you feel resentful about other things to do with your husband and/or his family. If that's the case, deal with the important things. Fretting about this will make you seem unhinged, and will not help you to resolve any larger issues.

I completely understand where you're coming from but I'm not sure there's any way of fixing it without sounding petty.
I had similar in that I started singing a particular lullaby to my DC and I fantasised about it being our "thing". Until his dad started doing the same and playing it to him on YouTube. Now it's "their thing" and it makes me sad because it was the lullaby my dad used to sing to me.
But I just try and remember that he will have other special memories of me and they probably won't be the things I expect them to be. This will be the same for your DS. Yes, you want the pet name to be special and you now feel it's "tainted" but what your DS will remember is the smell of your perfume, the way you tucked him in at night when you weren't even aware that you had a particular way of doing it, or that you were the best at helping with tricky Maths homework. Try not to be too precious about things. Your DS will decide for himself what's important.

I had this.

I had a little pet name for DS that my in-laws 'stole'

I felt exactly the same as you, annoyed but didn't know how to say anything without sounding petty or off my rocker.

So I stopped calling him in in their company.

After a while I just said (in a major passive aggressive way) "your names not xxx it's YYY isn't it? Silly Grandad" directly to DS when ever he called him it. Only did it once.

He stopped. And now I'm only one that calls him his nickname.

Yes it might make me a dick, but I didn't and don't care. It was important to me, so I get it.

Geez! It's a pet name/nick name. Get over it. Your family heard you call him that and they also love him and prob call him that bc they think it's sweet.