"Our Father"

To me, those two words are ever so conspicuously absent from Joseph's reckoning with his brothers. I could use the word reunion, but at the same time, my hunch is that the brothers were more petrified when they learned that it was Joseph, than when they simply thought it was the true-born Egyptian viceroy with practically unbounded power. 

The brothers saw daggers in Joseph's eyes, yet he looked on with the utmost compassion, consoling them, and encouraging them. 

Yet to me, after this monumental, yet humbling reunion, one phrase - if you could call it that - should have been uttered, two words stringed together that would have carried such import, which were never said: "our father." With the chasm, the gaping abyss having been somewhat closed, what better rhetorical device could Joseph have used than to say, in an off-handed way (if there is such a thing in the Bible), "our father"? 

"I am Joseph, is my father still alive?"

Then, when Joseph cajoles his brothers, walking them through the steps of what they had to do in the face of their unmitigating shock, almost to systematically desensitize them, he again says: 

“Now, hurry back to my father and say to him: Thus says your son Joseph, ‘God has made me lord of all Egypt; come down to me without delay."

Then, "And you must tell my father everything about my high station in Egypt and all that you have seen; and bring my father here with all speed.”

Why then does Joseph not utter these two words? Could it be that he wasn't able to? Or was he simply reflecting to them the harsh reality that for Jacob, just like Rachel was his only wife, for him, in a matter of speaking, Joseph and Benjamin were his only children?