We grew up with neighbors/godparents from Mississippi, and so we learned to call the lady next door "Miss Firstname." It kind of balanced the difference between the formality of last names and the too-informality of first names with no title. This turned out to be very useful when I married into the Vietnamese culture, which has the same habit (more or less), and then raised a child in that culture in St. Louis.
I had a whole pile of pseudo-aunties (for some reason, their husbands weren't uncle, even though in some cases we knew and liked each other - I think I avoided calling them anything). Auntie Jean is still going, I think, which is remarkable - and she still got the paper doilies out when Dad and I went over when Mum died.
The Asians (mostly of Pakistani origin) around here do it - uncle this, auntie that - when speaking in English, and it makes me laugh and think about biscuits and doilies. And RIP (not-uncle) Len.
When I was at infant school, there would be some days (very occasional) when my parents (who ran a pub) would not be in when I and my brothers came home from school. On these days we would go to "Auntie Joan Herrington" who lived up the hill. She was an elderly lady, who was a regular at the pub and friendly with my parents. As far as I knew, the "auntie" was an honorific title.
Roll forward 50+ years and I started to do some family history research and discovered that "Auntie Joan" WAS actually a relative! If memory serves me correctly, she was a cousin to my grandmother.
Probably a pond difference or even a Western difference. We always called our adult neighbors by their first names. Except for one couple which were much older than the other adults.
Perhaps more a regional difference (whichever side of the Pond) than a Pond difference. When I was a child (the 60s and early 70s), there was one couple who were very close friends with my parents, and my sister and their daughter were best friends. They and the music director/director of Christian education were pretty much the only non-family adults I called by first names, or would have thought of using first names with. A child calling an adult by first name indicated a family-like relationship.
Though now that I type this, there was, and still is many places, the Southern tradition of calling an older woman “Miss FirstName.” (It’s “Miss” regardless of marital status.) This was heard as an indication of respect and affection. My grandmother was “Miss Mary” to most people, while her sister was “Miss Susie.”
Among my wife’s and my close friends, the practice of all of our children was to call the adults in the group “Mr. FirstName” or “Miss/Miz* FirstName.” Around the time they got to high school, the “Mr.” or “Miss/Miz” was dropped. A similar pattern was used at church.
* In many parts of the American South, “Mrs.” was, and is, often pronounced miz. I remember our reaction was “Ms.” was introduced in the late 60s/early 70s, because in terms of English as we spoke it, it was no different.
The teenagers in my roleplaying group avoid using my first name if they can help it even though they don't call me anything else either. (US, Chicago)
I similarly avoided calling adults by their first names at the same age. Heck, I still have some of that. For instance our pastor encourages people to call her Firstname, but if I ever address her, I call her pastor. It's not as formal as Pastor Lastname or even Pastor Firstname and I'm comfortable with it, so it feels like a good compromise. I like her, but she's not my friend--woman is good with boundaries, she wouldn't want to be friends with one of her parishioners--so I still prefer to avoid first names. To me, that's for casual equals.
I too have trouble calling people who are very much senior to me (in age or rank) by their first names, even if they've invited me to--but that's probably no surprise, as I've spent so much of my life in a hierarchical Asian culture.
On the other hand, we've spent maybe eight years serving at the same double congregation as a fellow pastor, and he has never invited us to use his first name. (My husband is both longer serving and much older than he.) This feels very odd, and truthfully, as if he doesn't want us any closer than bare acquaintances.
I must admit that when we moved to Canada and I was minister of an Anglican church, I found it strange when a couple of the congregation persistently called me "pastor". Never been called that before!
It kind of unnerves the staff both at the medical center and at the congregation when I call my doctor or pastor by first name. The doctor first introduced herself by first name; and as an ordained person I have always called fellow clergy by first name. Heck, I even do it with bishops.
Then we have so many PhDs running around in this rural town, it is just so much easier than trying to remember titles.
My preference is that my kids still call me Mum. My daughter did try it on with my first name recently, and I ignored it, but to me (and this is just me) for them to change to my given name would be like denying the mother/child bond, which is unique. All sorts of people call me by my given name, but only my kids can call me Mum.
I agree with this too. My children came to me when they were quite young and asked if they could call me by my first name. I said, yes, they could - but everyone called me by that name, they were the only two people in the world who could call me "Mum"; did they really want to do that? They quickly decided not. I would quite like to have some familial name for my sons-in-law to use and my daughter's husband did briefly try calling me "Mumin" (short for Mum In Law) but it never stuck.
I don't think my son's husband would be on board with calling me anything except my first name and - to swing the thread back towards its subject - he very seldom talks to his family at all. This made relationships very strained when we first met him as our son checks in with us pretty regularly. Having met the family and heard a bit more of the history I understand a bit better.
@Nenya - it's often difficult when two people in a relationship bring very different family experiences and expectations to their union.
My wife comes from a large extended family, where dropping in on one another without warning is normal and where it is expected that there will be regular family gatherings. I come from the complete opposite - my siblings and I have always lived apart from one another and would never dream of "dropping in" without at least a week's notice. And it's not as if my family had any toxic breakdowns - we never fell out with one another, we just never felt it necessary to be in each others pockets.
The partner of my wife's nephew came from a highly toxic family and she has always struggled to put that behind her and be accepted in a family where she was just loved for who she was.
When I was young, and I think this has continued into adulthood, preachers were addressed as "Pastor FirstName." I feel like this must have been a shift somewhere before my time, since in most professions you wouldn't say, for instance, "Professor Paul" or "Doctor Tim." It'd be "Professor Dawson," "Dr Freedman," etc.
I don't think I ever referred to an Anglican priest by their first name before I became a warden.
I wonder if that's an American thing. We like our informality, though sometimes it seems a little child-like. And it certainly varies by culture and by context. I have to strain to think of our current rector's surname, now that I think about it.
When I was young, and I think this has continued into adulthood, preachers were addressed as "Pastor FirstName." I feel like this must have been a shift somewhere before my time, since in most professions you wouldn't say, for instance, "Professor Paul" or "Doctor Tim." It'd be "Professor Dawson," "Dr Freedman," etc.
Round here it's common to refer to our GPs as Doc Firstname, but also sometimes Doc Lastname.
When I was young, and I think this has continued into adulthood, preachers were addressed as "Pastor FirstName." I feel like this must have been a shift somewhere before my time, since in most professions you wouldn't say, for instance, "Professor Paul" or "Doctor Tim." It'd be "Professor Dawson," "Dr Freedman," etc.
Round here it's common to refer to our GPs as Doc Firstname, but also sometimes Doc Lastname.
That feels like something you'd do more with children around here, not so much with adults, though I think there might be variance.
If I knew either of the names of the doctor I got to see (if I made it that far - there's a lot of online interaction now) at our surgery, I'd be doing well.
More on-topic, I ended up working with the bloke who had been my first personal tutor at university. He was a bit forbidding, and I never got past 'Dr F_' to the presumed familiarity of 'Roy'.
If I knew either of the names of the doctor I got to see (if I made it that far - there's a lot of online interaction now) at our surgery, I'd be doing well.
More on-topic, I ended up working with the bloke who had been my first personal tutor at university. He was a bit forbidding, and I never got past 'Dr F_' to the presumed familiarity of 'Roy'.
No kidding. The last doc I saw at our local clinic retired and lately it has been whichever doctor is available at the time.
I'd feel weird being that familiar in a professional setting, but I'm a bit weird by American standards.
A random thought re the OP subject. My dad died a few years ago when I was 56. He had always been 'difficult' in various ways, and even worse at times I won't expand on here. As time went by after he died I started to feel more confident in myself, freer and more 'me' in ways not easy to elucidate. Perhaps more mature in my character.
So it occurred to me that maybe when an adult child starts to reduce contact with a parent they might discover they are functioning better in life and then might think 'well my life is better with less contact, how about no contact?'
I recently started communicating with my dad and realized that I'd picked up a lot of his bad emotional habits as a child and needed to unlearn them to save my own life from echoing his in some unpleasant ways. And this isn't something he taught, it's the way he coped with his life. It's practically subliminal, unconscious. I can look at what I know of his biography and draw lines, kinda like doing "the historical Jesus" combined with inferences from what I do know about him as a living person.
And I think he kind of sees that, by degrees, because he can feel that there's something amiss in our relationship but he doesn't have the toolkit to really get to it himself, so at one point I just said with some heat "Look, the one thing I can say is that you and mom didn't work out your issues. So whatever you didn't work out, I inherited." I don't need to get into detail or get rancorous. It's too late, and honestly, I don't see any sense in carrying a grudge.
It's not really his fault. And in fairness, I can see the way that a measure of my inability to work out my issues with him is now being passed on to my eldest who is off to college. And that's my responsibility. It worries me that she's going to end up with the same kind of situation.
[brief digression while I have that actual chat with my daughter who is in the same room IRL]
So I don't really blame my dad for this, exactly. I'm kind of ticked at my mom for her role, but both of my parents are to some extent trauma victims and they were brought up in a culture that didn't teach people how to properly deal with themselves. Honestly, neither do we. It deeply disturbs me that I feel like I'm ahead of the game and yet I'm also barely scratching the surface.
The weird thing is I think some folks would feel ashamed to be described so, but to me "Meh, that's everyone to some extent." My dad is a pretty great guy by many measures, and I do give him honor.
And we haven't really lost touch, per se. It's just that I realize now that we have kept a very distant emotional connection, and - in my personal history - there are some pretty deep reasons for that which I never really got into and - truthfully - I do not need to get into here.
Some of that sounds familiar to me, @Bullfrog . But there's nothing I can do now - Mum is dead, Dad is slowly losing his mind (but very slowly, at the moment) and when he lies to himself about how happy they were, it's only me to be offended - and I don't think that even matters to me much, now. I pray for humility, dignity, easy things like that
Some of that sounds familiar to me, @Bullfrog . But there's nothing I can do now - Mum is dead, Dad is slowly losing his mind (but very slowly, at the moment) and when he lies to himself about how happy they were, it's only me to be offended - and I don't think that even matters to me much, now. I pray for humility, dignity, easy things like that
Some of that sounds familiar to me, @Bullfrog . But there's nothing I can do now - Mum is dead, Dad is slowly losing his mind (but very slowly, at the moment) and when he lies to himself about how happy they were, it's only me to be offended - and I don't think that even matters to me much, now. I pray for humility, dignity, easy things like that
My (step)dad is saying things like that--"we had the perfect love" and all that--even though I know better. But I'm not about to contradict him and bring his sandcastle tumbling down. If and when he finally decides to "go there" and have THAT discussion with me (God help us both!), well, then, I'll pray for the right things to say. But if he intends to cling to this illusion forever, I'm okay with that, he can straighten it out with God. He's not requiring ME to sign up to his vision of their marriage, after all. (And I'm keeping my mouth shut.)
I refrain from talking to my 90 year old father about his relationship with my deceased mother and our family life. I just don't feel like starting to unpack it at this time in our lives.
Yeah, it feels right to me for now to stick to pragmatics, focus on protecting my kids. He's a grandfather now. I'm very mad that it took me this long to realize what was going on in the first half of my life. And so much of that came out of my childhood. But I don't see any sense in turning him into a lightning rod.
And he's still mad at his birth family. I might try to work some sympathetic magic and advise him to try to let those grievances go for his own good.
My husband is currently low-contact with his sister. He has blocked her on all means of direct contact. She can still contact me. Co-incidentally, I messaged her this morning trying to improve matters. I'll be following this thread with interest.
She has got some fixed ideas about us, which are just not true, and tries to interact with us accordingly. (E.g. when our children were school age, our household income for two adults and two children was over double her income as a single woman. She was convinced we were rich because we had over twice her income. When we said that raising children was not cheap, she didn't believe us. She still thinks we are rich now because she assumes we were saving throughout. We simply don't have the vast savings pot she thinks we have. We are not the rich relatives she thinks we are.)
I'd really like things to improve between us, but don't know how.
We are within a gnat's crochet of going no-contact with my husband's sister.
The main issue is that she imagines or invents something unpleasant about us, and relates to this imaginary "us" not "real us". I keep thinking that if only there was some way of us actually getting to know each other it should be possible to get past this.
The current issue is that she thinks we put some sort of curse on her on 1 Jan. She wants us to lift this curse. What she wants us to do would be both quick and easy, but we are refusing because, it seems to us, that if we did it would confirm that we laid a curse. Which, for the avoidance of doubt, we didn't!
There's a whole range of these weird imaginary things she doesn't like about us, although the 1 Jan curse is the main issue at the moment.
The only reason we are not already no-contact, is because we are the "last men standing." She has alienated every other member of the family and I'm genuinely worried about her. If I thought she had any other supportive family member in her life, we would be long gone.
Goodness - that's actual early modern type behaviour. People made witch accusations this way by ostentatiously asking the person they thought laid on a sickness/ misfortune to reconcile with them and pray for their health/ etc. Accepting the ritual and their subsequent recovery was taken as evidence that you'd bewitched them in the first place.
Yeah I wouldn't do that. I'm not sure what you should do. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of help for vulnerable adults. ( A distant pensioner relative has an abusive spouse as carer and we cant get anyone to do anything about it)
On the positive side none of this impacts on us, beyond the frustration and exasperation. Nobody is going to believe that we cursed her.
OMG I grew up with a mother like that, who also tried to put curses on other people. (She didn’t call it that – she considered it psychic rather than magical. But if something bad happened, it was always “because” someone was thinking bad thoughts about us, and she always had a person in mind. And she would try to psychically harm others, so she’d stand at the window and point her finger (noisy neighborhood kids riding past on their bicycles, for example) and make a kind of “psssss” sound and called it “zapping” them. Suffice it to say that I believe in the paranormal, in spite of, not because of, her ghastly, paranoid worldview. It strikes me as most disturbing that, believing people could harm others psychically, she deliberately tried to do so herself on a regular basis.))
Because of their abuse (so much other stuff) and ability to “trigger” me even on the phone, at one point for a few years I did not let them have my phone number. (There was a way to call people by pressing, at least in my part of the United States, *67 before making the call, and your number wouldn’t turn up on caller ID, so I could call them from time to time without the danger of getting hit with a random emotional land mine.)
They’ve both passed (2006 and 2007), and I pray they’re both doing better now.
I refrain from talking to my 90 year old father about his relationship with my deceased mother and our family life. I just don't feel like starting to unpack it at this time in our lives.
My mother lived to 99. Before she died, I sat down with her and just let her speak about her life. No judgements. Just asked a couple of questions. If your father is still of sound mind, just let him talk. See where it goes.
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The Asians (mostly of Pakistani origin) around here do it - uncle this, auntie that - when speaking in English, and it makes me laugh and think about biscuits and doilies. And RIP (not-uncle) Len.
Roll forward 50+ years and I started to do some family history research and discovered that "Auntie Joan" WAS actually a relative! If memory serves me correctly, she was a cousin to my grandmother.
Though now that I type this, there was, and still is many places, the Southern tradition of calling an older woman “Miss FirstName.” (It’s “Miss” regardless of marital status.) This was heard as an indication of respect and affection. My grandmother was “Miss Mary” to most people, while her sister was “Miss Susie.”
Among my wife’s and my close friends, the practice of all of our children was to call the adults in the group “Mr. FirstName” or “Miss/Miz* FirstName.” Around the time they got to high school, the “Mr.” or “Miss/Miz” was dropped. A similar pattern was used at church.
* In many parts of the American South, “Mrs.” was, and is, often pronounced miz. I remember our reaction was “Ms.” was introduced in the late 60s/early 70s, because in terms of English as we spoke it, it was no different.
I similarly avoided calling adults by their first names at the same age. Heck, I still have some of that. For instance our pastor encourages people to call her Firstname, but if I ever address her, I call her pastor. It's not as formal as Pastor Lastname or even Pastor Firstname and I'm comfortable with it, so it feels like a good compromise. I like her, but she's not my friend--woman is good with boundaries, she wouldn't want to be friends with one of her parishioners--so I still prefer to avoid first names. To me, that's for casual equals.
On the other hand, we've spent maybe eight years serving at the same double congregation as a fellow pastor, and he has never invited us to use his first name. (My husband is both longer serving and much older than he.) This feels very odd, and truthfully, as if he doesn't want us any closer than bare acquaintances.
Then we have so many PhDs running around in this rural town, it is just so much easier than trying to remember titles.
I agree with this too. My children came to me when they were quite young and asked if they could call me by my first name. I said, yes, they could - but everyone called me by that name, they were the only two people in the world who could call me "Mum"; did they really want to do that? They quickly decided not. I would quite like to have some familial name for my sons-in-law to use and my daughter's husband did briefly try calling me "Mumin" (short for Mum In Law) but it never stuck.
I don't think my son's husband would be on board with calling me anything except my first name and - to swing the thread back towards its subject - he very seldom talks to his family at all. This made relationships very strained when we first met him as our son checks in with us pretty regularly. Having met the family and heard a bit more of the history I understand a bit better.
My wife comes from a large extended family, where dropping in on one another without warning is normal and where it is expected that there will be regular family gatherings. I come from the complete opposite - my siblings and I have always lived apart from one another and would never dream of "dropping in" without at least a week's notice. And it's not as if my family had any toxic breakdowns - we never fell out with one another, we just never felt it necessary to be in each others pockets.
The partner of my wife's nephew came from a highly toxic family and she has always struggled to put that behind her and be accepted in a family where she was just loved for who she was.
I wonder if that's an American thing. We like our informality, though sometimes it seems a little child-like. And it certainly varies by culture and by context. I have to strain to think of our current rector's surname, now that I think about it.
Round here it's common to refer to our GPs as Doc Firstname, but also sometimes Doc Lastname.
That feels like something you'd do more with children around here, not so much with adults, though I think there might be variance.
More on-topic, I ended up working with the bloke who had been my first personal tutor at university. He was a bit forbidding, and I never got past 'Dr F_' to the presumed familiarity of 'Roy'.
No kidding. The last doc I saw at our local clinic retired and lately it has been whichever doctor is available at the time.
I'd feel weird being that familiar in a professional setting, but I'm a bit weird by American standards.
So it occurred to me that maybe when an adult child starts to reduce contact with a parent they might discover they are functioning better in life and then might think 'well my life is better with less contact, how about no contact?'
And I think he kind of sees that, by degrees, because he can feel that there's something amiss in our relationship but he doesn't have the toolkit to really get to it himself, so at one point I just said with some heat "Look, the one thing I can say is that you and mom didn't work out your issues. So whatever you didn't work out, I inherited." I don't need to get into detail or get rancorous. It's too late, and honestly, I don't see any sense in carrying a grudge.
It's not really his fault. And in fairness, I can see the way that a measure of my inability to work out my issues with him is now being passed on to my eldest who is off to college. And that's my responsibility. It worries me that she's going to end up with the same kind of situation.
[brief digression while I have that actual chat with my daughter who is in the same room IRL]
So I don't really blame my dad for this, exactly. I'm kind of ticked at my mom for her role, but both of my parents are to some extent trauma victims and they were brought up in a culture that didn't teach people how to properly deal with themselves. Honestly, neither do we. It deeply disturbs me that I feel like I'm ahead of the game and yet I'm also barely scratching the surface.
The weird thing is I think some folks would feel ashamed to be described so, but to me "Meh, that's everyone to some extent." My dad is a pretty great guy by many measures, and I do give him honor.
And we haven't really lost touch, per se. It's just that I realize now that we have kept a very distant emotional connection, and - in my personal history - there are some pretty deep reasons for that which I never really got into and - truthfully - I do not need to get into here.
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And he's still mad at his birth family. I might try to work some sympathetic magic and advise him to try to let those grievances go for his own good.
We are within a gnat's crochet of going no-contact with my husband's sister.
The main issue is that she imagines or invents something unpleasant about us, and relates to this imaginary "us" not "real us". I keep thinking that if only there was some way of us actually getting to know each other it should be possible to get past this.
The current issue is that she thinks we put some sort of curse on her on 1 Jan. She wants us to lift this curse. What she wants us to do would be both quick and easy, but we are refusing because, it seems to us, that if we did it would confirm that we laid a curse. Which, for the avoidance of doubt, we didn't!
There's a whole range of these weird imaginary things she doesn't like about us, although the 1 Jan curse is the main issue at the moment.
The only reason we are not already no-contact, is because we are the "last men standing." She has alienated every other member of the family and I'm genuinely worried about her. If I thought she had any other supportive family member in her life, we would be long gone.
Yeah I wouldn't do that. I'm not sure what you should do. There doesn't seem to be a great deal of help for vulnerable adults. ( A distant pensioner relative has an abusive spouse as carer and we cant get anyone to do anything about it)
But it sounds exasperating.
Wyrd sisters, eat your hearts out.
OMG I grew up with a mother like that, who also tried to put curses on other people. (She didn’t call it that – she considered it psychic rather than magical. But if something bad happened, it was always “because” someone was thinking bad thoughts about us, and she always had a person in mind. And she would try to psychically harm others, so she’d stand at the window and point her finger (noisy neighborhood kids riding past on their bicycles, for example) and make a kind of “psssss” sound and called it “zapping” them. Suffice it to say that I believe in the paranormal, in spite of, not because of, her ghastly, paranoid worldview. It strikes me as most disturbing that, believing people could harm others psychically, she deliberately tried to do so herself on a regular basis.))
Because of their abuse (so much other stuff) and ability to “trigger” me even on the phone, at one point for a few years I did not let them have my phone number. (There was a way to call people by pressing, at least in my part of the United States, *67 before making the call, and your number wouldn’t turn up on caller ID, so I could call them from time to time without the danger of getting hit with a random emotional land mine.)
They’ve both passed (2006 and 2007), and I pray they’re both doing better now.
My mother lived to 99. Before she died, I sat down with her and just let her speak about her life. No judgements. Just asked a couple of questions. If your father is still of sound mind, just let him talk. See where it goes.