And you may call me . . .

 When I was a kid, I called my friends’ parents, my parents’ friends and essentially every adult person Mr or Mrs or Miss.  By the time I was in my teens, there were a couple of Ms thrown into the equation.  Even my first boyfriend’s parents were Mr and Mrs Matthews; he called mine Mr and Mrs Lourde.  I don’t recall ever even knowing my teachers’ first names.  There were also the friends-who-functioned as family – my mother’s best friend and her husband were “Aunty” and “Uncle”, as were my Dad’s best man and his wife (and I still call them this now, even though I’m in my 40s).  The only family friends I can remember calling by their first names were our next door neighbours – for some reason, they were always Ella and Terry, and their kids called my parents by their first names. 

Nowadays, I’m the grown up, and without exception all of my children’s friends (and all of my friends’ children) call me “Meg”.  When I volunteer at my children’s school or work at the local kindy, the kids call me “Miss Meg”, but that was about as formal as it ever gets.  Truth be told, I’d feel weird being called “Ms Lourde” (or the Mrs version, using my married name) by the children that I know.  I still think of “Mrs Lourde” as my mother; “Mrs Married Name” is my mother-in-law.  And the only kids who call me by the aunty tag (and I actually prefer tia, not aunty) are my nieces and nephews.

Perhaps it has something to do with the fact that a fair number of my friends started having children relatively young – I’d only just turned 25 (and was four days into marriage) when the first of our close friends became parents.  I was still getting used to the idea of being a Mrs myself at that point, so the notion of our friends’ daughter calling us Mr and Mrs didn’t even cross our minds.  That set the scene for the rest of our friends’ kids – I was just Meg.  I did have one friend who liked her daughter to call adults by a formal title.  She was ok with her daughter using my first name, so long as there was a title before it, so that was the first time I was Miss Meg.  Another friend’s daughter always saw my husband and me together, so she assumed we shared a name – until she was about five, irrespective of if she was addressing us together or individually, she called us Marcus-and-Meggie (always in a sing-song tone, too).  I must admit to being very sad when she finally realised we had separate names and stopped using our combined name.

My children used surnames for their school teachers (with essentially all of the female teachers getting called something that sounds more like Mizz that Miss or Ms), but call most of the adults that they know by their first names.  The exceptions to this are a few of my father-in-law’s friends – he introduced them to my children using Mr or Mrs, and so that’s what we stuck with.  When first introducing my kids to a new adult, I do ask if they’d prefer my children to use their surname rather than a first name, but I can’t think of a single adult who has opted for that.  Even the adults who teach their after school classes go by first names (occasionally with a Miss or Mr in front).  And everyone seems perfectly happy with that.