agonyaunt | (no subject)

Dear Carolyn: My partner and I are expecting our first child in a few months. We are on the same page about most of the big aspects of child rearing but have a couple of minor disagreements. One that’s not so minor is about what the child will call us.

My partner calls his parents by their first names, which was a decision made decades ago in the spirit of egalitarianism. I call my parents Mom and Dad. I understand the philosophy that went into my in-laws’ choice, but I don’t especially agree with it and don’t really want to continue that custom. This seems like an area where it won’t work for each of us to do it our own way, i.e., calling us “Mom and Ben” (seems more confusing than anything else). So what do we do?

— "Mom and Ben”

"Mom and Ben”: I actually like Mom and Ben. Why not? Seems to me that if “confusing” is an issue, then we’re all living in the wrong millennium.

Plus, like so many of these parental things you decide in advance, reality will come in with its vote, which has a way of wiping out certainties that you can only hope someday to laugh about. Reality’s changes are often upgrades, too, because they’re collaborative in ways that preconceived notions can never be.

Not to say you’re wrong to talk about it — that part’s good, especially if this is the tip of a major-philosophical-disagreementberg. In fact, the more I think about it, the more urgent it feels that authoritative-you and laid-back Ben work out a general approach for when your parenting styles clash.

Just understand that any parenting plans you make ahead of time are more like an opening gambit with life than a last word. And kids can roll happily along with parents of different styles, but not when the parents themselves can't.

Readers’ thoughts:

· Our oldest insisted on calling me “Ben” for the first four years of his life, including saying things like, “my Ben told me to come home now,” etc. My wife hated this, but she did not interfere. By 5, he decided to call me “Dad.” You may think you’re deciding this, but like many other things in life, your kids are the ones who make the decisions.

· When my niece and nephew were in elementary school, they tried to call me by my first name, no “Aunt.” I quietly told them they were the only people in the world who could call me “Aunt [Name],” and that gave them special powers. They were momentarily stunned and resumed calling me Aunt [Name]. Now in their 30s and parents themselves, they still call me that.

· If your real (underlying) concern is what strangers will think when they hear your child call you Mom and Ben, please dig into that, because that’s worth questioning the importance of that in relation to your husband’s preference to be called by his name.

· We always referred to ourselves as Mom and Dad, but, for whatever reason, our toddler child started calling us “Mommy Maria” and “Daddy Captain” after watching “The Sound of Music” and then transitioned to our names at some point, “Joe and Jane,” for a couple years, and then switched to “Mom and Dad.” It was weird for me to be “Mom” after all those years.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/advice/2023/06/24/carolyn-hax-expectant-parents-name/

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This kind of reminds me of the beginning of Voyage of the Dawn Treader, where among the various litany of sins ascribed to Eustace and his family -- such ~horrid~ things like "vegetarians, non-smokers and teetotalers and wore a special kind of underclothes. In their house there was very little furniture and very few clothes on beds and the windows were always open." and Eustace liking non-fiction -- one was "He didn’t call his Father and Mother “Father” and “Mother,” but Harold and Alberta."

As a vegetarian, nonsmoker and teetotaller, I was quite annoyed by this when I read it.

Although I don't leave windows open, and I like blankets and doonas.

Ahahaha I remember that bit, and even though I'm not a vegetarian nor a teetotaler I remember thinking, "so what's wrong with any of this? Open windows mean fresh air!" Clive Staples had a lot of very decided opinions about things.

Note: he called himself "Jack" from early childhood.

So would I if that were my name, ahahaha

Indeed. The other children bullied him for his name, that's why he changed it.

He was only about three when he chose the name Jacksie (later shortened). I don't think it was due to bullying.

I have certainly read that it was related to bullying, but I'm not willing to look it up, so I'll assume you have and let it go.

Regardless of the reason he went by the name, it was his name in all but one very specific sense.

Apparently there's a theory that it was after a dog called Jacksie who was run over. I don't remember ever reading about that in any of the standard books and wonder if it is an urban legend or I missed it somehow.

I suppose he wouldn't have put this in a children's book, but my head-canon is that Alberta is running the local birth-control clinic! - his list maps almost exactly to a diatribe of George Orwell's in The Road to Wigan Pier about vegetarians, teetotallers, healthy-lifers, birth-controllers etc.

Comment from a tor.com discussion: I think it was the teetotalism and “special kind of underwear” that sounded Mormon. In fact, Lewis is drawing on Nesbit here. The Eustace Scrubb (“and he almost deserved it”) thing is based on E. Nesbit’s gentle take-down of faddy folks, as embodied by one “Eustace Sandal” (Nesbit speaking in the voice of Oswald Bastable):

“Father knows a man called Eustace Sandal. I do not know how to express his inside soul, but I have heard Father say he means well. He is a vegetarian and a Primitive Social Something, and an all-wooler, and things like that, and he is really as good as he can stick, only most awfully dull. I believe he eats bread-and-milk from choice. Well, he has great magnificent dreams about all the things you can do for other people, and he wants to distill cultivatedness into the sort of people who live in Model Workmen’s Dwellings, and teach them to live up to better things. This is what he says. So he gives concerts in Camberwell, and places like that, and curates come from far and near, to sing about Bold Bandaleros and the Song of the Bow, and people who have escaped being curates give comic recitings, and he is sure that it does everyone good, and ‘gives them glimpses of the Life Beautiful.’ He said that. Oswald heard him with his own trustworthy ears. Anyway, the people enjoy the concerts no end, and that’s the great thing.”

As a member of the Fabian Society, Nesbit no doubt knew an awful lot of people like this (even George Bernard Shaw, though by no means a dull fellow, was a vegetarian and — at least for a time — an all-wooler).

The children end up visiting Mr. Sandal’s sister’s house (“She was like him, only more so in every way”) and complain about its being so very plain: “There were only about six pictures — all of a brownish colour.” Very much like Lucy and Edmund’s opinion of their aunt and uncle’s house.

The underwear would almost certainly have been the Jaeger favoured by GBS, a cultural reference probably widely apprehended in the UK when Lewis was writing but incomprehensible to other audiences.

You would think, when I reflect on it, that people who descend from a tradition which includes William Morris and HG Wells might be rather more sympathetic to imaginative literature....

All-wool-ism is coming around again. Masses of people claiming they can wear merino wool everything 365 days a year. Some of the garments are very nice, even if the extreme theories are, well, extreme.

! interesting!