For some reason, when you’re pregnant, people love to bombard you with horror stories. They tell you about their terrible births, their sleepless nights and their breastfeeding woes, almost delighting in the fact that you’re too far down this track to reverse. Most of the things people warned me about – never getting to go to the bathroom alone again or being unable to shower for days on end – were just horror stories which could be avoided if you felt sufficiently inclined to do so.
But there was one Nostradamus-style prediction that I was unable to avert. “As soon as you have a baby,” one friend, a decade my senior and a pro at the parenting game, warned “you stop having a name. Everyone just calls you ‘Mum’.”
The first place this happens is during antenatal care. And I’ll admit, initially I found it rather sweet. Before I got pregnant, I would drink buckets of chardonnay in Soho. During pregnancy, I was lying on a hospital bed while a midwife felt my abdomen. My promotion to mother felt unlikely and unreal, so being called “Mum” for the first time was strange but nice experience.
The novelty quickly wore off. A couple of months later, a health visitor came to my house and removed my C-section stitches while I lay on my sofa, wondering whether this medical process should have happened somewhere sterile. She asked me a slew of questions about my baby, calling me “Mum” the entire time, and then as a parting shot asked one half-hearted question about my mental health. “Fine!” I said, as she packed up her stuff. Which must be true, right? I wasn’t actively planning to harm myself, so I was fine. Obviously, I wasn’t fine, but I wasn’t going to confess that to someone who clearly needed to get to their next appointment and who, crucially, hadn’t even used my name. By calling me “Mum” she was unknowingly sending the message that she was there to see Rebecca the parent about her newborn baby. Not Rebecca the person about having just become a mum.
Every medical practitioner I saw in the first year of my daughter’s life addressed me as “Mum”. When she stopped breathing at nine days old and we were blue-lit to hospital, when we were in with suspected strep A, always, always just “Mum”. The pushback I always get on this complaint is that these people are busy, and I get that. But my name is on the form, it’s on the hospital bracelet, it’s everywhere. I don’t expect anyone to remember it, that would be insane. But would it really be so hard, when you’re terrified for your child’s safety and seeking reassurance, to be spoken to as a person rather than a parent?
It’s not just medical staff, though. There’s a ghastly tendency on a woman-to-woman basis to use it instead of each other’s names. And in that case, it’s always “Mama”. Instagram is laden with posts reading “you’ve got this Mama!”, “welcome to the mama club!”, “how are you holding up, Mama?”. I’ve even occasionally caught myself doing it, despite the fact that I’ve never called anyone that in real life – and I’m still never fully sure how I’m supposed to pronounce it.
Most of the inspirational stories I’ve heard don’t open with “I had my assistant call a meeting.” But earlier this week I gained a new hero when actress Kayley Cuoco said that she had done exactly that. This week, on Conan O’Brien’s podcast she explained that after she had her baby, her team all started calling her Mama, and that it drove her utterly mad, so she had her assistant call a meeting to tell them to stop.
I don’t have an assistant (God knows I could use one), but I have increasingly taken a leaf out of Cuoco’s book, and when someone calls me “Mum” in a professional setting I have very gently said, “Rebecca”. I’ve never had any pushback about it, and I don’t think it’s marked me out as a rude nightmare. They’ve always seemed perfectly happy to use my name going forward and I’ve always felt better. More empowered to make choices.
I love being a mother, it’s one of the best things about me, but it’s not the only thing about me. And I don’t want a generic moniker in lieu of my name.
'President Musk' is flexing his muscles and revealing how weak Trump is