Pence Calls His Wife 'Mother'

[haele]

9. It's regional. In some areas, once they have children, the spouses identify each other as a parent.

It's also very old fashioned. Ronald Reagan supposedly occasionally called Nancy "Mommy" when he was being "folksy" and inviting the public into his family, but he didn't do it constantly, and certainly would not have done so when asking for her advice or for semi-authoritative information from her in public.
I remember my Great-grandmother from Missouri, born in 1887, still referred to her late spouse as "Father" (as opposed to "your father) when talking about him to around family when we were visiting up through the 1970's and 1980's - but not when there were other visitors. Maybe if Great-Grandfather was still around (he died in the late 1960's), she might have called out "Father" if she was calling him, as some older novels and film show "country folk" doing when talking to each other, or talking about each other when the other is there.

It's rather like spouses calling each other Mr. and Mrs. [Last Name Here] in public.

However, both ways of addressing spouses have pretty much fallen out of general use since WWII. Society has moved passed assuming that spouses were "one unit", that the wife was an extension of the husband.

And it is very odd that Mr. Pence will identify his wife as only the mother of his children, rather than a woman of her own and or even as an adult extension of himself (i,e., calling her "Mrs. Pence...&quot when she is supposed to be in a position of prominence. It belittles her in public to call her "Mother".

Haele