Mothers and fathers

In the bad old sexist days, Mothers and Fathers was probably the only game where small Spanish girls played with small Spanish boys on something approaching equal terms.

Children playing at mothers and fathers called it jugar a las mamás y los papas, an oddity in itself, because a Spaniard still refers to my mother and father as mis padres, literally fathers. 

Spain now accepts in print that a couple can be composed of a separate madre and padre not to mention single-sex families of two madres or two padres.  In the meantime, and particularly for the middle-aged and over, parents remain padres.

The entry for padre in the Spanish Royal Academy’s Diccionario de la Lengua Española is about 56 lines long, give or take a line or so to allow for the stage where your eyes cross and you lose your place.  The entry for madre is around ten lines shorter. 

Padre involves authority, leadership and dominance, while celibacy does not prevent a priest from being considered un padre with – theoretically at least - authority over churchgoers.

The female head of a religious communities receives the title madre but as well as meaning a woman who has borne a child, the word madre crops up in networks, frameworks and ramifications. 



Definitely not a principal channel



An irrigation system’s principal channel is la acequia madre and a main drain is una alcantarilla madre while a principal beam or column of any kind of structure is known as la madre.

When the habitually emphatic Spanish wish to sound super-emphatic they resort to padre: no presto dinero a nadie, ni a mi padre – I don’t lend money to anyone, not even my father. 

The exclamation ¡tu padre! is an irritated reaction to an action or statement not meeting with approval but describing anything as de padre y muy señor mío conveys intensity or magnitude.  

Conjuring up a word-for-word translation of le echó una bronca de padre y muy señor mío is not easy, but he gave him a hell of a telling-off gives a rough idea of what went on. An unaccompanied padre still indicates ructions: me echó una bronca padre – he gave me an awful telling-off.

Mentar a la madre de uno – to name someone’s mother belongs to the very Latin custom of insulting a person through their mother.  This is why hijo de puta or hija de puta – son or daughter of a… well… a woman who charges for her favours is still an unforgivably nasty thing to call someone. 

On the other hand, the proclamation that something es de puta madre is a compliment and means that it is very special indeed, although once again the mindset is oedipally convoluted.

¡Tu madre! is found in identical circumstances to ¡tu padre! but ¡mi madre! suggests more surprise than ire and this, together with ¡madre mía!, also conveys its quota of exasperation. 

¡La madre que te parió! – the mother who bore you! can be hurled as another insult, but in the elliptical way of many Spanish sayings, ¡viva la madre que te parió! is a lavish compliment, especially if addressed to an attractive, feisty or impressive female.

Verbal tradition still lays emphasis on the importance of a mother’s role.  So much so, that desmadrarse, despite its original meaning of to wean or separate livestock from the mother, now means to rebel. 

The noun desmadre originally meant the act of weaning, but now corresponds to excess or an out-of-hand situation - something that mothers know all about, and not only when it comes to weaning.