It goes without saying that whether you’re a same-sex parent family, a single parent family, or a co-parenting family, parenthood is full of proud moments. Eating solids, walking, and talking all come in at the top of the list when it comes to achievements.
As a Rainbow Family though, we have our own special proud moments…
- Being accepted as a family.
- Not having questions asked about your family set up.
- Being called the right names!
But as same-sex parents, there are a handful of milestones that mean more to us than any of the others. For us, we haven’t reached many as T has only been around for a mere 23 and a bit months, but the other day we had our first ‘two-mum milestone’.
T called me ‘Mummy’ and Sharon ‘Mama’
In a world of ‘Mummy and Daddy’, whether it’s on the television or in books, it’s quite normal for toddlers to pick this up as their normality when it comes to calling their parents. It’s taught in schools, it’s spoken of in the playground. There’s no avoiding it.
For a same-sex parent family, it’s also not uncommon for the child to just call both parents ‘Mama’ or ‘Dada’ until one of them answers and we were used to this happening ever since T learnt the word ‘mama’ and then changing it to ‘mummy’ later on. But one day, whilst I was in the garden and Sharon was upstairs, we heard T call us both by our separate names. T went to the stairs first and shouted “Mama!”, but when Sharon didn’t respond he came to the back door and shouted “Mummy!!” I was gob smacked.
See, ever since he could say both ‘mummy’ and ‘mama’ we’d been trialling a method of not answering when he called us the ‘wrong’ name but more often than not we would just answer him when he was repeating the same name as we didn’t want to just ignore him! But when he called us by our separate names our hearts melted.
EMBED: https://www.instagram.com/p/BSGtU5zFxkD/
It makes a difference
I’m sure when every parents hears their name being called for the first time it melts them, but for us, as a same-sex parent family, hearing your child differentiate between two names that, technically, have the same meaning, it means the world to us.
To T, we’re now two separate people with two different names.
K
4 comments
Awww Kate this is so lovely! What a big moment, clever boy T xx
That’s amazing! What a clever little guy he is! I love these sorts of moments, they’re the ones that will stick with you forever throughout the wilderness of raising kiddos! xx
Ahhhhhh, that’s lovely!
(We’re going through a phase of M calling her dad ‘Steve’; he is not impressed)
What an amazing moment for you both. I’d never thought about things like that, but it’s so important. I noticed my friend had shared this and she and her wife have a little girl a bit younger than T. It must be inspirational for families in the same position to see that there are wonderful moments like this on the horizon.
Nat.x
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