Oh mother.

Wednesday means free local newspaper. Nothing interesting in there today though, apart from a picture of my brother's mate and his girlfriend and their newborn daughter. It seriously freaks me out that my little brother has friends who are parents. Isn't he like 15? Actually, no, he's not at all. Anyways, the father in question is someone I remember from when we were kids, because he was one of our neighbours. He was a very disturbed and troubled kid who grew up to be one helluva fella. I specifically remember that he used to call his mother "mother". Uhm, as opposed to "mum" or whatever. We were digging a sand castle once when I asked him why the hell he calls his mother "mother". He explained it to me in a way that I've been laughing at ever since.

"Because that's what mother called her mother, and her mother called her mother" and so on.

I thought this was a pretty unique way of explaining things, until I saw a programme on tv about an 8yo girl whose father had left her mother for another guy. The girl was narrating the programme herself, obviously reading stuff from a paper, it sounded that natural and easy. She was going "this is where I live every other week, this is where my dad and my bonus-dad live, when I don't live here I live with mother". Whoever had convinced this kid to tell her story (well, her parents story, I guess) obviously thought the use of "mother" needed some 'splaining, so the kid added that very same statement that my brother's friend told me some 18 years ago.

Seriously, what a great way of making your kid the laugh of the playground. It's not unusual enough to have two dads (in the rainbow sense), she's going round shouting "mother" whenever she wants attention. Imho, she's probably getting more greif about the mother-thing than the dads-thing.