Nicknames may be personal. When one stepfather continued to use a nickname for his stepson that was most closely linked with the child’s late father, the mother intervened to put a limit. Read the story to know what happened and let us know whether the wife was right in publicly chastising her spouse for calling her son a nickname.
Source: Reddit
I’ll preface this by saying that I,F34, lost my late husband years ago to Cancer. I have a 6 year old son named “Joseph”. I met my now husband “Tim”, M37 2 years ago and got married recently.
Tim loves Joseph, considers him as his own and he has shown that many many times. We don’t normally have any issues except for this: Tim started a habit of calling my son a nickname “Joey”. My problem with this nickname is that it was used by my late husband for Joseph and it is kind of special to him. I asked Tim to not use this particular nickname and he at first fought me off about it then came around and stopped doing it.
Days ago. I hosted dinner with my late husband’s family (they visit regularly). We sat down for dinner and suddenly, Tim outloud said “Hey JOEY! Could you pass me this plate please?”. The whole room went quiet. I got all sorts of dirty looks from my late husband’s family because they know this nickname was exclusively used by him. I looked at Tim and then lashed out at him loudly and in front of everyone telling him that what he did was not okay and was a major overstep. He seemed shocked and said that he really wasn’t paying attention and it was a slip up. I responded that I already warned him about it a million times yet chose to ignore it. He was red in the face. He got up, excused himself to the bathroom and stayed there.
After the guests left he started arguing that I embarrassed him, hurt his feelings and went too far scolding him publicly over a slip up. I said that I already told him about how me and my late husband’s family feel about this but he said that we should get over ourselves especially since Joseph clearly doesn’t care. We argued some more then he and I stopped talking to each other. Did I go too far here? Does he have a valid point?
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
