“Babies do start babbling around six months or even earlier, Mom,” the doctors would say. Only a few of them called Penn Dad, but she was always Mom. This must have been covered in the fellowship year if you did peds because no one in all her years of training had ever suggested to her that she call a patient’s parent Mom. If anyone had, she would have explained that its subtext—you know less about your child than I do, for I am a trained professional and also because, as a woman, you are slightly hysterical—was offensive, untrue, and frankly embarrassing for the physician.
