HINT: Skip to the end if you're wondering why Martha calls me "TJ."
For as long as I can remember, I wanted a nickname. For whatever reason, I've always connected nicknames with words like "blindie," blind jokes, and the right to (with consent) guide me in an unconventional way. All these things have to be earned.
In the same way I despise outer-circle folks going around pontificating about "blindies," teasing me for a "blawkward" (blind plus awkward) moment, or steering me by the shoulders, I have always chafed at people's insistence on calling me "Cait," "CJ," or, God forbid, "Caity," unless they've expressly been told that I liked it.
I wonder if I connected these ideas because, in the same way people project false familiarity around blindness, I feel that people have attached nicknames to me as a means of declaring friendship, connection, or even ownership that isn't really there. Or maybe it's just because, as a blind kid trying to cut it in a sighted world, with extracurriculars, blind stuff, and (then unidentified) ARFID sprinkled over a typical childhood, I felt like I had so little autonomy.
As a kid, I was Caitlin to just about everyone. Very early on, my dad nicknamed me Trouble, or its derivatives, Troub and Troublemaker ... but that was very much his nickname alone. No one else used it until, years later, entirely unaware of my dad's nickname for me, my seventh-grade science teacher also awarded me the same label.
"Cait" and "Caity" were exclusively family names, with only my grandparents and Aunt Linda allowed to use "Caity." My grandpa, with his affinity for Spanglish mixed with the occasional German from my grandma, called me "Diablito," or "little devil." In hindsight, I found it interesting that he didn't use "Diablita"; perhaps this was a nod to my wild-child, tomboyish behavior. I wish I'd thought to ask him before he passed away in 2012.
By fourth grade, I was taking nicknaming into my own hands. My infamous Deraitland bestie, Derek, myself, and some other friends sometimes invented languages. In one, "Caitlin" backwards became "Niltiac," pronounced sort of like "Nil-shyack." In another, "Caitlin" in braille, upside-down, became "Itincoma," which I loathed and Derek, subsequently, used often in an attempt to rankle me.
The nickname I lusted after constantly was CJ, for my first and middle initials. Derek, happily, was DJ, a nickname which I used a lot. CJ never really took, but for a time, we became "Coodge" and "Doodge," with the double Os in "book." But these were very much Deraitland names, and perhaps with good reason. I could be misremembering, but they may have been a nod to our constant fixation with imitating the speech synthesizers of the time. Though CJ and DJ would not have been read as "coodge" and "doodge," those names were reasonable approximations of how a screenreader might have misread them.
By fifth grade, I was going totally rogue. I brailled and typed "Cat Hernandez" on all my papers, as though it was my given name. When some grown-ups would obligingly write "Cat" but never call me that, I tried Kit, Kit-Cat, and, in a final, desperate attempt, C. Nothing worked.
"Cait" and "Caity" remained staples with the family; my dad added "It" and "Little It" to Troub and Trouble; and my sister, for reasons I now can't remember, called me Poopsy. My mom, when I was being particularly cute, would call me her "Little Lamb Chop," which I liked only because I loved both lamb chops and the show Lambchop's Playalong. But such a nickname was too sappy for public consumption.
This seems like a logical time to pause and state that I have no problem with the name "Caitlin." It fits me. I'm especially grateful my parents picked the spelling they did, not only because I prefer the way my spelling looks in braille to that of all the others, but also because it enables me to make my albeit somewhat confusing crack, "Caitlin: remember, two Is but cannot C. Get it? Two EYES but cannot SEE," which, if you don't think about it so hard that you wonder whether the "cannot" means you ought to use a K and not, in fact, the correct C, helps people spell my name correctly.
No ... in spite of the fact that there's no good story behind my name, other than that it went well with Courtney, my older sister's name, and that my dad had heard the name and thought it was, quote, "nice," I like my name. I think, though, that I did sometimes come to associate it with being in trouble. Maybe it was because people couldn't wave, make eye contact, or get to me visually, but often, even today, when I hear my name called, even in a casual way, I immediately panic and think that I'm in trouble. Sad, but perhaps true ... and possibly a reason why I always longed for a nickname that wasn't restricted to a certain crew of friends.
In college, I tried to start out as CJ with my a cappella group. A few people used it somewhat, but in more of a tongue-in-cheek way, not as a true nickname. Amusingly, a label which did stick was "Cajherna," derived from my collegiate e-mail address, which I had not chosen. Apparently, there were so many C Hernandezs that the system spat out the second letter of my name, my middle initial, and the first part of Hernandez. I had to dictate my school e-mail address so many times when signing in at events that my a cappella group, claiming it sounded like a sneeze, began to call me that every so often. Another of the Acquire contingent, Andrea, also took to teasingly calling me Button, which came to light because of a random guy who, upon seeing us in Safeway and recognizing us from busking, said, "I remember you all singing, and I had to stop and tell you ... you're just as cute as a button." Some casual ableism there, as he must have known we were both college students and still insisted on treating me like a disabled child. However, as with "blindies," we took the comment and turned it into something fun.
Some other in-group names:
* Dez: short for Hernandez, from a later Acquire member, Caroline, and later adopted by the CRE Outreach (now Arts Up LA) boys.
* MC, PC, LC: standing for "Poor Child," "My Child," and "Little Caitlin," respectively: all nicknames my dad came up with in the era of texting, again poking fun at people's insistence on feeling sorry for me or infantalizing me, even when nothing is wrong.
* Little: What my sister started calling me, after getting me a braille bracelet which read "little sis." (She, of course, is Big, which appalls my mom, because some people are still laboring under the delusion that being big is bad. I might add that, though she's taller than me, Courtney is actually more delicate / small-presenting.)
* Ti-Ti: What my niece has called me every since she could talk ... technically from the Spanish Tia, although no one in our family speaks Spanish meaningfully, and I doubt the kid even knows that ... I was just always Ti-Ti. It would be so weird if she ever called me Caitlin.
The thing with nicknames, though, is that, beyond lamenting frequently that you want one, you can't force people to come up with the perfect, awesome, organic encapsulation of you. And then, once they find one, you can't coerce other people into using it ... and even if you could, it might seem weird, or nonsensical, depending on the origin of the nickname.
Which brings us to Martha, and TJ.
So you all know our adorable eight-year-old Rock Wilder (Rottweiler), Maite. Mighty Maite. Big MaÃte. Fubu (For Us, By Us). Big Rock. Ruccoon (after Rocky Raccoon). And on and on.
Since Maite was already Martha's "dogter" before I came on the scene, I became "Stepmom" to her. If you've heard any of our videos or recordings, or read transcripts, Maite has a very distinct way of speaking, a little like a kid with some speech quirks, sound additions and deletions, and some unexpected ways of mixing and garbling words and terms. So Stepmom became "Tep Mom" ... and, because I, of course, had told Martha about my quest to be "CJ," CJ, in Maite-speak, became "TJ." And because Martha is Martha, TJ stuck more than CJ did, because MaÃte is such a talkative fixture in our house.
Now, because I'm a rule-following people-pleaser, I did object, "But TJ has to stand for something. It's too confusing to explain, otherwise. How about Trouble Junior? Trouble has always stuck, and Maite is clearly the biggest troublemaker in our house."
To which Maite, of course, responded, "That is not no true story, Tepmom, GAH!"
But TJ stuck ... and now you all know the story. And while I would prefer for you to just call me Caitlin, I'm always open to new nickname ideas, should they arise. Just make sure you've earned it, and that I've approved, before you go shouting it all over the place.
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