from mama to mommy

He picked it up over Thanksgiving, the inevitable result of spending the week with two older cousins he adores. All their echoes of “Mommy” must have kept ringing in his head long after the plane touched back down in snowy Minnesota, because ever since then I’ve been “Mommy,” too.

And it takes some getting used to.

I never meant to be anti-Mommy. It’s what I remember calling my own mom in my earliest memory, so of course it’s a name filled with love. But when it came time to babble at my own babies, Mama came more naturally.

Maybe it was all those Romance languages bubbling around in my head, with their lilting “a”s and their sharing of these most basic words in every tongue.

Maybe it was because its two-syllable cadence closely mirrored my own first name, and I could adjust more easily to the title (and the idea) of motherhood when it reflected what I knew best.

Or maybe it was because it echoed my babies’ own first words, the mouths of little ones full of repeating sounds that over time smoothed into recognizable language.

Whatever the reason, I always loved Mama.

And now, with him, I have to let it go.

. . .

I am starting to learn a few strong truths about parenting from these early years that I suspect will endure till my own children are bringing their families back home for Thanksgiving.

One of these is that I cannot control who my children are or what they need. I can only respond to them as best I know how, with the love and wisdom I’m given at that time.

He does not need Mama now. Of course he needs me, but he is becoming his own boy, full of his own view of the world and his own playful use of the language he is coming to command. He needs to move on when he is ready, and he needs me to catch up.

He needs me to let him go, little by little, word by word. So that when the bigger steps come – the kindergarten bus and the solo bike ride round the neighborhood and the sleepovers and the middle school dance and the driver’s license and the high school graduation – I will be practiced in all these smaller releases.

This has always been the way mother love works.

But every goodbye is a tiny sorrow, too. A turning from the comfort of what was to the unknown of what will be.

. . .

For a few days my husband kept wrinkling his nose every time he overheard “Mommy.”

“When’s he going to drop that?” he grumbled, himself the bearer of “Babbo,” an Italian endearment for daddy. Maybe he saw himself next, losing that link to his own father and the family he loves.

(Or maybe the nasally whine so easily attached to Mommeeeeeee was starting to grate on him, too.)

“I don’t know,” I shrugged as we each stood at half of the kitchen sink, rinsing the dinner dishes.

“Maybe it’s just a phase.”

Or not, it seems. Every day the insistence grows stronger: Mommy, can you help me? Mommy, can you get my breakfast? Mommy, what’s 72-31? Mommy, will you read my story for bed tonight?

Once in a while when he cries, from a bumped knee or a brotherly wrong or the sheer exhaustion of being four, he still calls out for Mama. Old habits die hard, and the earliest words are the easiest to wail. The hardest to root out completely.

But we seem to be firmly planted in the new land of Mommy. My ears are still adjusting. Clearly my heart is, too.

Someday, I remind myself, I will be mourning the loss of Mommy for Mom – so short, so crisp and curt, so easily tossed over the shoulder on the way out the front door. Then I will long for one more syllable to pull him back towards childhood, back when my lap could be enough and my kiss could heal his hurts.

This is only one more first step. Only one more last. 

Of course there is still his younger brother who clings to Mama with a koala’s claws. And there is another on the way who has yet to babble a single syllable. Mama will still echo off these walls for years to come.

But now we have new words, and every linguist knows the subtleties mean new realities.

And I always have to squirm a bit before I settle into someplace new.

. . .

This week I’m reflecting on Advent and the power of names at CatholicMom. What does it mean to choose a name? To be given a name? To live into what a name might become?

Perhaps it’s a dreamy part of pregnancy, this playing with possibilities, this lying in bed at night wondering what we’ll call him or her.

But I find it a daunting prospect each time, to name another person. To shape the beginning of identity by vowel and consonant. To help mold their life by the meaning of what they are called…

I wonder what Mary and Joseph and Zechariah each thought when they received a mystical announcement of their child’s name.

Did they love the choice from the moment it slipped the angel’s lips? Would it never have made it onto their own mental list of possibilities? Did they have to grow into the idea just like they had to grow into the surprising prospect of parenting—one couple before they were even married, the other couple long after they thought the chance had slipped them by?

Click here to read the rest at CatholicMom.