Why Do Some Married Couples Refer to Each Other as “Mother” and “Father,” Even When Kids Aren’t Around?

Hi there, you have A Way with Words.

Hi, this is Rachel.

Hi, Rachel, where are you calling from?

Cuyahoga Falls, Ohio.

Welcome. What can we do for you?

Thank you.

I was just interested in finding out a little more about something that I’ve always heard, which was a lot of older couples I hear call each other mother and father, and I wondered why that was.

They use this as names for each other. Like the man will call the woman mother and the woman will call the man father.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And is this something you hear in your family or do you work with a lot of folks who do this?

I’ve never heard it in my family. I’ve heard it in other people’s family. And I’m a nurse, so I’ve worked with a lot of elderly over the years. And I’ve heard it between them.

Do you get a sense that it happens to couples that have children?

Some of them have children. Others, I don’t think that they did. Or maybe they had children in the past.

How do you feel about it? Are you just curious or do you have feelings one way or the other?

I mean, I don’t really have any ill feelings towards it or anything like that. I’m just a little thrown off by it.

Okay.

Because I’m not hearing it from my generation or anything like that.

Yeah, I’m glad you asked about it because there’s always a little more to this sort of thing than first meets the eye.

Occasionally people will comment on this sort of thing where two adults call each other mama or papa or mother and dad or mother and father. And talk about a sense of a loss of identity or that somehow the claim of parenthood has somehow usurped the role between a married couple. And they’re no longer calling each other husband and wife or pet names between them that talk about their relationship without any reference to children or offspring.

But one thing I should say is it’s not necessarily generational. It’s more likely to be the kind of thing that is cultural, passed along almost as a family way. That is, something that you heard done by your grandparents or your relatives and that you learned to do just because you’ve seen it done, and not necessarily regional or geographical.

We know that it at least goes back as far as the 1850s because Charles Dickens used it in his book Little Dorrit, which was published in 1855.

I asked about whether or not they have children because for many cases, it’s because when you’re talking about your spouse in front of very young children, you use the name for your spouse that the children are most likely to understand. So when my son was very little, I wouldn’t say Sarah, my wife’s name, in front of my son. I would say mama because that’s what he calls her. And so after a few years of that, it kind of stuck. And even now that he’s 15 and probably already taller than me, it still seems a little weird to call her by her name in front of him. I just call her Mama. And only when we’re in front of outsiders do I catch myself. And I’m like, oh, yeah, it’s weird to say Mama across the table in front of her father, you know.

It does seem very odd.

But amongst the three of us, it is a special name for her that only two people in the whole world get to call her. And, you know, it doesn’t only happen in English. Other languages and other cultures do the same thing. And it happens to grandparents as well.

My mother and father went from being mom and dad to pop and Grammy. And I even now call my mother Grammy when we’re around and my son is around because that’s how he knows her. Even though for my whole life, until he was born, I called her mom.

That makes sense. That was pretty informative. I didn’t really think of it that way. So it’s nice to know where it came from.

Thank you.

All right. Take care of yourself.

Bye.

Bye-bye.

Bye, Rachel.

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