Mom and Dad: What's in a name?

During our recent trip to California, our daughter kept cracking us up by referring to our friends, her godsisters' parents, as "The Mom" or "The Dad."

This is reminding me of how weird it seems to me when the mother and father in a family with kids refer to each other as "Mom" and "Dad" the way my in-laws sometimes do (as in, "Dad washed the trailer yesterday."). I always want to say, "But he's not your dad!" I can see how that habit gets going, but I'm still very careful to refer to my husband as "your dad" when I refer to him in conversation with my daughter. Nor do I want my sweetheart calling me "Mom" -- that's a term reserved for his mother.

I have never been able to call my in-laws "Mom" and "Dad," either. Perhaps it's from having step-parents as a kid, but the words are just too loaded with meaning for me to toss them around so casually. I never once wanted to call my stepmother "Mom" -- she was always a stepmother and never let us forget it. Yet I have finally become comfortable with calling my stepfather my "Dad." (Language is powerful; every time I call my stepfather "Dad" it represents to me a jab at my father, whom I've taken to calling my "birthfather"). It is because my stepfather is a dad to me, so much more so than my father. And over the years we have stayed tight, even though my mother and stepfather divorced many years ago.

As for what my daughter calls me, I love it that she says, "Good morning, Mama." And it melts my heart every time she calls me "Mommy." When I was a kid, I used to call my mother and father by their first names, to the amusement and consternation of friends and family. When I was a teenager, my mother asked me to pick another way to refer to her. We finally settled on "Ma," which I like. And I still refer to her -- and no one else -- as my mom.