The Boss Man, The Mother, and Other Strange Creatures…

I want to talk about something that’s been sitting in my head today, and maybe it’ll sit in yours too. Sometimes it’s not the loud arguments or the dramatic events that tell the real story of a family; it’s the small things. The choice of a word. The way a person gets referred to. The quiet renaming of someone you once called Mam or Dad.

In my family, my brother — let’s call him Bully for the sake of consistency — never called our parents Mam or Dad. Not even our mother or our father. No softness. No personal claim. Just The Mother and The Father. Like characters in a play. Distant, impersonal, like they belonged to no one.

It struck me today how cold and detached that actually was. At first glance, you might think it was harmless. A quirk. But it wasn’t. It was a symptom of something deeper.

Later on, after our dad was diagnosed with dementia, Bully started calling him The Boss Man. As if giving him a title could mask the fact that the man himself was slipping away. Or maybe it was Bully’s way of coping with the power shift – from the man who was once in control to someone who needed care and protection.

But the thing is, people don’t choose language like that for no reason. That kind of distancing, that refusal to use words of warmth or familiarity, speaks of old wounds. Unspoken resentment. Pain that never found a safe place to land. It’s easier for some people to depersonalize those who’ve hurt them, or those they’ve resented, than to face the messy reality of being hurt by someone you were supposed to love.

It made me think about all the families out there where people move around each other like ghosts. Where the names change to titles, and the titles strip away humanity. Where grief and trauma sit just beneath the surface but nobody dares to name it.

Because if you start naming it, you might have to feel it.

Maybe you’ll recognize this in your own family. The names people refuse to say. The way someone’s memory gets sanitized, mocked, or rebranded after they lose their power. The private language of avoidance we all learn when the truth is too big to carry.

I’m not writing this to shame anyone. I’m writing it because these patterns are everywhere, and they matter. They affect the way families grieve, the way they heal, and the way generational trauma gets passed down in silence.

Pay attention to what people call each other in your family. The real story often hides in those words.

Message for the day:

Pay attention to the little things people say when they think no one’s really listening. That’s where the truth lives. And if you catch yourself giving someone a title instead of a name, ask yourself what you’re trying not to feel. It might be the start of finally setting it down.