I just got off the phone with my sister. Mom’s okay after her fifth fall in three years. It happened this morning. This time she only hit her elbow, so no broken bones. No trip to the hospital. Only some pain that restricts the movement in her right arm, enough so that she told me that when she went to dinner tonight, she couldn’t get the fork all the way to her mouth, so half the bite went in her mouth and half the bite went in her lap. That would have bothered her massively back in the days when I called her Mama, but it didn’t seem to phase Mom at all.
I don’t know when I made the switch from Mama to Mom. Now that I think about it, I still use Mama sometimes. It’s context dependent. But growing up, Mama was definitely Mama.
Daddy was definitely Daddy, too, and I still call him Daddy most of the time, but every now and then I find myself calling him Dad. Daddy, by the way, grew up calling his parents Mother and Father, but as soon as he got a college degree (or maybe even sooner), he switched to calling them Bill and Marion and I never heard him calling them anything else.
I wanted my kids to call me Mama, but they never did. I was Mom, only Mom, nothing but Mom. And their dad was Dad, not Daddy.
What did you call your parents when you were growing up? Do you call them that now?
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I know I’m no BJ Skinner/Cameron Prof, but I always enjoyed his diaries along these lines and I’d like to keep his spirit going by continuing in that vein. Let me know if you like that idea or if you think it sucks. Thanks!