My friend always misspells my daughter’s name on purpose

The girl is called Katelyn, but a 'friend' spells it Caitlin. As a parent, would you be annoyed about this?

An Aussie mum shares her story with Kidspot.

When I named my eldest daughter, Katelyn, I didn’t really think it was unusual or that there would be any issues that can come with more unusual names like mispronunciations or confusion over spelling. For the most part, I have been right in this assumption.

Occasionally when signing Katelyn up for new things, or when she has changed teachers at school, we have had to spell her name out, or correct other versions of the name like Catlin, usually after doing this once, it has been pretty simple for people to remember.

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"I let it slide at first"

There is an exception to this, however, a good friend of mine, *Mel, has always spelled Katelyn’s name, Caitlin, and refuses to change it.

I met Mel when our daughters joined the same netball team about four years ago. They became fast friends on the court, and we became the same on the sidelines.

The first time Mel misspelt Katelyn’s name was on a birthday invitation for her daughter, where ‘Caitlin’ was invited to join in on the party celebrations, rather than ‘Katelyn.’

 At the time, I just let it slide, I didn’t realise that we’d all end up still being friends years later and I didn’t think it was worth bringing up.

But as more and more time went on, we often found ourselves meeting outside of netball games and training and doing things together, both myself and Mel, or with the kids too.

Mel and I would text or write messages on Messenger to organise these dates. When I was writing, I’d refer to ‘Katelyn’ as we spell it, while in response, Mel would write ‘Caitlin’ instead, sometimes directly after my own message. It looked as if we were referring to two separate people.

This is when I realised that her misspelling on the invite wasn’t an oversight and that she had meant to write Caitlin then, despite knowing that we spelt it Katelyn and that she definitely knew now but continued to do it. By this time though, I felt a bit awkward about saying something so continued to let it slide.

Image: iStock

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“It’s not how you spell Katelyn” 

Then one evening when Mel and I were out for some drinks, I decided to bring it up.

“We spell Katelyn, K-A-T-E-L-Y-N,” I told her very politely.

“I know,” Mel replied.

“Then why do you spell it differently and not as we do?” I asked, confused by her response.

“Because it’s not how you spell Katelyn,” she said.

We chatted about it for a little while longer, but it became clear that she didn’t see our spelling of Katelyn as correct and wasn’t about to change her mind or spelling of it and for whatever reason, remaining ‘right’ about it was important to her.

Apparently, Mel is a spelling master, and I am not.

It pissed me off that she had this attitude about my daughter’s name and that for whatever reason she decided that this was something she needed to put her foot down about, but I also didn’t want to get into a big argument about it because Mel was a good friend, and our daughters are too.

Her daughter spells it correctly

Two years on, and four years since we’ve known each other, and ‘Katelyn’ is still ‘Caitlin’ in Mel’s eyes. While it is usually only ever an issue over texts and invitations, sometimes with netball it can cause some confusion if Mel is ever doing any admin for training or games and writes down a person who isn’t actually on the team, but this doesn’t happen often.

Funnily though, her daughter spells Katelyn correctly and I wonder how Mel finds this, that her daughter is ‘misspelling’ the name, or if she even knows.

While Katelyn doesn’t seem to care, as her mum, the one who gave her the name, it does frustrate me every so often because it just seems like such a sign of disrespect, purposefully misspelling a child’s name because you don’t agree with that version of it.

But like everything with a friendship, there is the good and bad and in the case of my friendship with Mel and that of our daughters, well the good outweighs the name issue so I do my best not to let it annoy me too much.

Originally published as My friend always misspells my daughter’s name on purpose