“It should be noted, however,
that veto power ultimately goes to the baby, who may eventually ignore even
unanimous decisions and call you what he or she likes.”
n Miss
Manners, Press Democrat, May 23, 2014 responding to a readers query
about appropriate names for grandparents.
Was this even a conversation in the past? Did the generation who were our grandparents
ever question the elegance or appropriateness of a time honored title like
Grandma and Grandpa?
Alice Catherine Sheehan Carey could only have
been Grandma. We kids knew her title
before we knew her and there would be no fancying that. This was a grandparent very different from
Christine Telleson, our Danish and deaf maternal grandmother who lived with us
and who we had known from birth. When we met this Irish force of nature, come
to take care of us soon after our mother died, (I was seven, Tom and Ed, were
five and a half and three, and little Sheila was two) we called her
Grandma. I cannot imagine the
conversation in which Alice Catherine would suggest a cuter name.
My grandson, Ethan, has four grandmothers –
only three grandfathers. But, even
though most of us live close to each other, the question never came up – how
does the poor little guy differentiate?
And as the query to Miss Manners addresses, with multiples in the
picture and step grandmas, what is the protocol? Ethan worked it out by loving everyone of us,
so who cared what we were called.
Like so many aspects of today’s living,
consciousness and new social circumstances demand that we consider so many
things that we took for granted.
Say, for
instance, you’re in your 40’s and the title just doesn’t fit who you are and
how you live. My friend Michele told me that “grandma” was too generic and just
didn’t resonate. She asked her friend,
Juliana, who said her grandmother’s name was Precious. “That’s it!” So, Michele became
Precious and as Miss Manners points out, eventually shortened by the grandchildren
to “Presh.” You don’t meet that every day.
My choice was Nana. I liked it and figured it would be easy to
say. Like Dada & Mama, it would come
out easily and early. I wanted to hear
my darling boy call me. (The extent to
which some will go to satisfy their grand egos is sometimes astonishing, isn’t
it?)
I recently took a survey among friends and
family regarding names for grandparents – Grandma/Grandpa are still
winning. But we have a beloved Pops in
my son-in-law’s family. Vivian and Jim
are called Grammy and Papi. Some dears
whom I met recently were called Poppi and Granna.
Maggie and her granddaughter Hannah have
turned their names into an age old call and response in thirds (like playground
songs around the world). Hannah might be in another room, she might be waking
from a nap and she calls Mi-mi -- Maggie answers, Han-nah --
Mi-mi – Han-nah” Repetition and
comfort in that. She is Grandma by any
other name.
