It is something of a cliché when a parent says of their child, usually after they’ve done something very naughty, that “it turns out I really didn’t know them at all.”
It’s easily done, I guess. Your darling offspring says they’re off to the park, but really they’re hanging around street corners, lobbing apples at strangers’ conservatories; or they tell you they’re helping granny sort out her finances, when in fact they are pilfering her savings. There is only so far you can monitor what they get up to.
But what if it turns out you didn’t even know your child’s name? That seems unfortunate, especially when they are only nine.
My son is – to us anyway – a Tristan. He might have been an Edward, but our daughter vetoed that when we came to selecting from our shortlist, a few weeks before he was born. He was almost christened Tristram by a slightly hard-of-hearing vicar, until a godfather stepped hurriedly forward to save the day. And his schoolteachers seem to have made a collective decision, over several years, to refer to him in all correspondence as Tristian – despite that not in fact being a name at all.
So, Tristan he is. Sometimes Tristy, very occasionally Tris. It is a straightforward name, a gentle one, the moniker of a decent and upstanding young man.
And yet it turns out this is not the name he goes by once he walks through the playground gates into the bosom of his friends. Instead, our dear boy, the fresh-faced love of our hearts, becomes “Otter”.
We first had a whiff of this when one day he referred to himself as Otter in the third person – or third animal I suppose. I brushed it off at first, thinking it was a result of the surprising number of stories about otters he had collected on his bookshelves.
But then, arriving at a football match recently, I heard him be greeted as Otter by friend after friend, including kids he doesn’t go to school with. It was as if the team mascot had turned up, complete with novelty outfit.
For the first time, I became aware that my son has developed an identity of his own, beyond the one bestowed on him by his family. And it’s one from which I feel to an extent locked out, excluded. I wonder what else there is about his life and his sense of self that is beyond my sphere of influence or understanding. Do I, in fact, really know him at all?
Graciously, he has said I’m welcome to call him Otter, too. I don’t think I will take him up on the offer, but it’s at least reassuring to feel that he hasn’t developed an alternative persona to create a barrier between his home life and his social one.
Tristan and Otter are not, it seems, different beasts, but merely interchangeable alternatives. And certainly, they are outwardly recognisable as one and the same. It’s not a Peter Parker and Spider-Man scenario.
It remains unclear whether the nickname is one he encouraged, even chose for himself. Given his love for otters, I suspect it is, which shows a degree of confidence I admire – albeit that it’s an unusual epithet to have selected.
Still, better than “Tex”, which is what I got landed with for a while. And thankfully “Al” has no resonance among Gores these days – I had that too for a year or so, back in the ’90s. Perhaps he is sensible to have bagged a nickname he likes.
Indeed, it may also reflect a desire to be part of the crowd, for it turns out that he is not the only one of his mates with an animal alter ego. He has a close friend who goes by Mr Pigeon, and another who for a period was known as Geoffrey Cow 360, but is now just Cow. It’s like a mash-up of The Animals of Farthing Wood and Gladiators.
In the end, I should simply accept that it doesn’t much matter what name or nickname my son decides to use. He is just an otterly brilliant boy.
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