A word choice question

[awanderingbard]

This is a bit of an odd question, but I've grown up surrounded by couples who have never been divorced, or lost a partner and remarried, so I don't really know how people refer to their step-parents in relationship to the parent they are married to.

I have two characters with step-parents: Alec, whose dad is remarried and whose mum is not, and Sarah, whose parents are both remarried. So, if those characters were to refer to visiting their parents, would they be likely to say 'my parents' or 'my mum and step-dad/my dad and step-mum'. Would it depend on how they viewed their parents? Alec sees his step-mum more as a mother than he would see his own mum as his mother, whereas Sarah's parents divorced late in life, so she was raised by them both. I suppose it would be a personal choice, but I'm trying to be realistic. It seems clumsy to have to specify, but perhaps that's one of the complications of being a child of divorced parents.

Comments

[bookblather.livejournal.com]

My parents are both divorced and remarried (ish), both late in life-- I was nineteen when they divorced and they're just now getting engaged/remarried. I address their significant others by their first names, and in the third person I tend to refer to them as "my stepfather" and "my honorary stepmother" (the honorary to be dropped when they get married). However, when the relationships were first starting up, they were "my mom's boyfriend" and "my dad's girlfriend." I had no personal engagement with either one.

There's also my cousins. The eldest one has a different father than the younger two, so she refers to their father by his first name, and their mom as "Mom." However, the younger two use both their parents' first names, because their older sister was referring to their father by his first name, so of course they did too, and then realized that wasn't fair so now they call their mom by her first name too. IDK, my cousins are strange.

Anyway, the level of personal engagement might be the key. Someone raised entirely by a stepparent might refer to that parent simply as "Mom" or "Dad." Someone who's just met their stepparent might refer to them as "my parent's spouse." IDK if that helps.

[awanderingbard.livejournal.com]

This is all very helpful, thank you!