Hi, I'm Mickey!

This is me, apparently.

Okay, so the name of my blog post is deceiving. My name is NOT Mickey. It's Nicole. And for my first blog entry, I thought I'd share a childhood memory where my name was Mickey. Or I was called Mickey, anyway...same thing to a child.

Many years ago in my childhood (15 years to be exact), I walked into my 4th grade classroom just like I did every other morning. However, this morning was slightly different because we had a substitute teacher. To my delight, she told us that her first order of business as our sub was to have us make name tags for ourselves. She would call us by whatever name was on our name tags.

Let me add here, that I absolutely hated my name. Nicole. Such a boring, normal name. I was in 4th grade, darn it, and I wanted a new "cool" name that would hopefully stick not only with the sub, but with my classmates. So I tried my hardest to write "Nikki" in my coolest handwriting. Nikki was so much more cool than Nicole. I felt cool even writing the name. I smiled and waited for the sub to walk by my desk and announce my name.

When the sub did come over, she read off my card "Mickey". Now I don't know how she got Nikki and Mickey mixed up, but she did. My face heated up in embarrassment as a handful of my classmates laughed. I was too embarrassed to even try and correct her. Everyone else thought it was funny though, and the name stuck by the rest of the week.

After that week, I realized that maybe, just maybe being simply Nicole was okay. It was better than Mickey anyway. Then I looked forward to my 18th birthday when maybe, someday, I might change my name.