mama

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 … [Read more...] about from mama to mommy