If You Aren't My Child, Don't Call Me Mom

If You Aren't My Child, Don't Call Me Mom

What is it about the word "mom"? It makes me want to choke. Not when I hear it in my own house, uttered by my own child, in reference to me. In that case I love it — heedlessly, actually, as if this universal and mundane moniker were a pet name bestowed upon me by my beloved. In this same context, I also love "mommy." And -- especially (I confess) -- "mama," which, when carelessly employed by an 11-year-old who can now say “shit,” holds within its two mirrored syllables a time, not so very long ago but seemingly in another epoch, when that selfsame child was learning to differentiate who in her tiny universe was who.

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