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Aaah, this question from Sean takes us back over 100 episodes, to AMT86, when newlywed Kate asked us what title she should bestow upon her new lady wife. Being imaginative sorts, we suggested ‘wife’. Let’s see what we can pull out of the bag for Shaun:
I have the gay and next year I am marrying another man who also has the gay, and at this happy time in our lives we’re beginning to look forward and are on the borders of ‘thinking about a family of our own’.
Of course, being modern 21st-century types we’re less concerned with ‘how will we feed it and not let it die from our own ineptitude’, we’re much more concerned with superficial things like naming conventions.
Once we have adopted/surrogated/otherwise legally procured our children we’ve been wondering what we should encourage them to call us; it seems that calling us Dad and Dad or Daddy and Daddy would be confusing. It feels that we should each ‘own’ a term. I’m vetoing Pops, Popa and Papa. And of course we’re vetoing ‘mum’.
So, answer me this: if you had two dads, what would you call them to differentiate between one and the other?
I call both my parents ‘Sir’, of course. That’s de rigueur where I come from.
Readers, do you have – or are you one half of – a pair of paters? Please go to the comments to tell us how your own nomenclature situation shook down.
By the way, Shaun, the choice might not even be yours in the end; children tend to be fairly imaginative in this area, so whichever tasteful or humorous titles you opt for may be passed over in favour of a truly horrific bundle of infantile phonemes. But you’ll learn to love it. Or at least your defences will be so broken by the daily exertions of childcare that you won’t be able to correct it until it’s too late. Either way, you’ll be stuck with it forever, so you might as well not worry about it now.
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Answer Me This! Podcast 
August 17, 2011 at 11:00 pm |
I think it also depends on what you think your child/children using your first name. If you don’t mind too much, then I think there are more alternatives. I don’t know what you’re partner’s name is, but for the purposes of my argument I’ll pretend his name is “Alex”.
I think the options may be:
– Daddy Alex/Daddy Sean respectively
– Daddy A/Daddy S respectively
– Alex/Sean respectively
– Or, like Helen suggested, just leave the child to decide for itself (and hope for the best)
Good luck!