Being a new mum means getting used to a lot of new things. Some come expected, such as sleep deprivation or hormonally-triggered tears when watching TV commercials, others less so. I have been increasingly confused how the NHS staff here insists on calling me ‘mum’ and Samuel ‘baby’ every time we go for a check up. It feels odd to suddenly not be Julia anymore but the general and anonymous ‘mum’, who holds ‘baby’.
“Hi, mum,” the NHS nurse told me at a recent visit. “Do you want to sit over there, mum, and hold baby on your right arm?”
My first thought was that it must be quite confusing for the nurse to call other people who are not her mother ‘mum’. When I told Jose about it, we agreed that it might be another ploy by the British government to nudge teenage mothers into feeling more responsible by calling them ‘mum’ over and over again. Whether that will help to reduce the highest teenage pregnancy rate in Western Europe or just confuse all the rest of us…
— From London.
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smnevans reblogged this from whileyouweresleeping and added:
They do the same thing here in Japan, too. Quite a few married couples take it further, referring to each other as...
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whileyouweresleeping posted this
