What's in a name?

Names.
We all get one when we are born.
Sometimes two or three.
My name is Stephanie. I post as Stevie, because that is the name that most defined me for a long time. It is what my soul child Hayley-Bug calls me, and her mama, my dear friend Rachel... whom we all know as Rache.
Hayley could not really get her tongue around Stephanie.
Nor could my niece Margery when she was two or three, and to her, I was Dearie.
And still am today, when it comes down to it.
My Tony calls me Juliet.
My boys call me mom.
And Jeremy Stevens, my nephew by heart, to him I am Stepamy, for much the same reasons as Hayley. He just could not say my name when he was a wee gaffer.
My Tony is my love, my honeybunny.
Val is our Vally, Catherine is our Gypsy.
My boys are Scooter and Juster Buster to me.
My Darling Lovely, my Dearest Dru, my Wonder Twin... there are so many more people in my life I have my own name for.
What I am getting at is though we all have given names, so very often we create our own versions of them for the people we love.
I call one friend of mine Wil, because, I suppose, no one else really does, at least not that I am aware of. Of course, others could, but I doubt it. It is my name, the name of my friend, his first given name that he does not really use, a way to differentiate him, or perhaps myself, from the rest of the world.
My dear friend Peter, whom you have all heard about on my blog before, never called me Stephanie. To him, when I was his student, I was Stevens. His way, I suppose, to differentiate me from the others.
I cherish that.
It's funny, somehow, but though we are all so very formally given monikers, we find a way to make them ours. We don't change our own name, but that of others. To bring it all down to something quieter in our heart. To show that while we know the name on the driver's licence, there is something more to our version. Some secret message, of love or friendship, some part of ourselves we put into it.
There is so much in a name. And each one smells just as sweet.
Have missed you all... been so absent. Forgive me.
Yours, always,
Stevie.