u/kitten_fem

For background, my mom died when I was 12. I’ve lived with my dad and stepmom since I was around 6. When I was younger, my dad sorta told me and my sister to call our stepmom “Mom,” so we did. But after our mom passed away, me and my sister slowly started calling our stepmom by her actual name instead, and nobody really mentioned it.

A few years later, though, my stepmom got drunk and started crying about how we don’t call her “Mom” and how she helped raise us. My dad also said he’d prefer if we called her “Mom,” but we honestly don’t really want to. It feels kind of disrespectful to our actual mom.

Is it really a bad thing that we don’t want to call our stepmom “Mom”?