Life
The undeniable fact of being a parent is that you have to reconfigure you're entire concept of who you are. Everything gets shuffled. Your sense of self gets ripped apart, inverted, and in every other way transfigured before settling into its new post-kid shape. So I get that a change in how you're referred to is, sometimes, in order. After all, your someone's mom now. But I have more than a few reasons why I wont' let my partner call me mommy, and they're all rooted in the fact that, well, enough has changed about me post-baby already. I mean, there's just something about the cocktail of hormones, sleep deprivation, and suddenly seeing your home cluttered with pastel-colored bullsh*t whose function you couldn't have corrected identified a year ago that all add up and result in you feeling like a stranger. You're a different person, and the person you are now is... in need of a shower, for starters.
With all of these changes come changes in little daily habits, too. Your sleeping and eating schedules are entirely different, your social life requires a great deal more juggling just to occupy a much smaller parcel of your calendar, and your freezer is full of a lot more breast milk and a lot less vodka. This is all fine — it's not like you didn't know parenthood would change things, and you implicitly invited that change when you invited a tiny human to set up shop in your uterus.
But with all the changes that you and your partner are understandably now tasked with navigating, I'm going to firmly put forth the idea that one common new-parent habit needs to die: new parents calling each other "Mommy" and/or "Daddy." Who the f*ck decided this was a thing that grown-ass adults need to be doing? Guys, this is a weird thing to do!
Aside from it just being weird and kinda creepy in a way that both can't and shouldn't need to be explained, here are some of my more concrete reasons why I would never, ever let me partner call me "Mommy." (Ugh, I feel unclean just typing that.)
Because I'm Not Their Mommy
It's just factually incorrect and it makes you look dumb.
Because Our Kid Is Going To Learn To What To Call Me Without Their Demonstrations
Trust me, I say it to him roughly 87 million times an hour. My kid gets it.
Because It's Fine If Our Kid Learns My Real Name
Jessica is my name, and Mommy is my title. It's fine if he learns both. He probably needs to, anyway.
Because It's Not Hot
As if parenthood doesn't steal all the time and energy necessary to have an active sex life, you want to make a habit out of calling me "mommy" and run the very real risk that you might accidentally drop that sh*t in a rare moment when we find time to actually throw down? Definitely not. There's enough about having a baby that made me feel sexless and gross. No one wins here.
Because It Doesn't Even Make Sense
It's one thing when you're passing me the baby and say something like, "Go see Mommy!" Cool, totally, this makes sense because you're talking to our baby about me. But when you and I are unloading groceries while our kid sits in his bouncy seat trying to eat his fist, it helps no one for you to say sh*t like, "Mommy, do you see the carrots anywhere?"
Because I Need To Be Me
And that's on top of the fact that all of our family and friends refer to me as "Mommy" in his presence. It's still vaguely annoying when they do it, but I get that seeing other people call me that might theoretically help my son learn what object is attached to that sound I keep making at him all the time, so I'll let it happen. But I don't live with them. I don't have sex with them. I don't look to them to be the one person in the midst of this disorienting life change to be a reflection of the me who still exists, who existed before, and who will keep existing.
I need my partner not to call me "Mommy" because he's the closest person to me and I need to remember that I'm still someone other than Mommy because it's all I f*cking feel like sometimes, and if it were actually true, if that's all I really was, I would hate it. And I don't want to hate being Mommy, so my partner can't call me that, so I don't erroneously start thinking that's all I am.
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