From Helen Boyd‘s She’s Not the Man I Married.

the first time it occurred to me that my mother wasn’t just my mom or Mrs. My Dad, but actually had a first name, astonished me.  I remember feeling shocked by the realization that my mother was a person, like me, and not just someone who’d been invented or come into being as a result of my father’s need for a wife or my and my siblings’ need for a mother.