October 2022: To Name a Grandmother
To my utter delight, I recently learned that I’m headed into a new phase of life – as a grandparent! I couldn’t be more excited. This has been a long time coming.
I graduated high school with people who are great-grandparents. In fact, some of their great-grandchildren are old enough to nearly make them great-great-grandparents, an unfathomable thought. I’ve always been late to bloom, and this stage of life is no different. For many years, I was diplomatic about it and figured if any of my children ever came to the stage in their lives to start of family, it’d be okay, but if they never did, that would be okay too. However, when the announcement came that the new year would also bring a new family member, I quickly recalibrated my thinking.
For years, I’ve watched my friends’ grandchildren grow, and I’ve listened to them proclaim there’s nothing in the world like it. I won’t know fully what they mean until I’m deep in the trenches, but bring it on.
While preparing for a recent rummage sale, I pulled many boxes from the attic and in rifling through them, I discovered favorite old storybooks, games from the old days and even an entire collection of Tonka toys that we could put to work on my acre. I saved things from my children’s childhood, but I have saved things from my own as well. I know my grandbaby won’t just appear, ready for a game of Connect Four, but it’ll be there when he or she is ready.
The big thing my grandmotherly thoughts keep circling back to is my name. How does a grandmother find her name? Does she tell her grandchild what she wants to be called? I suppose some do. Is it a collaborative effort with the parents? There are so many options! Granny, Grandma, Memaw, Mimi, Nana. One friend who never had children said if she ever had grandchildren, she’d demand they call her Queenie. This brings images of a Disney villainess to my mind. But what if I’m missing some possibilities? I had let myself get caught up in this thought process, and then I remembered how it was when my son’s arrival created a new grandmother.
I was never the oldest grandchild, so my grandparents were already named by the time I came along. My grandmothers were both “Grandma” followed by their last name. This now strikes me as curious and oddly formal, but that’s how we grandkids distinguished one grandma from the next. While we were young, our last living great-grandmother, very old and shrunken, went by “Little Grandma,” for obvious reasons.
My grandmothers never seemed to mind what we called them, and I never questioned it. But when my first child came along and made my in-laws grandparents, a curious thing happened. That grandma did what I’m doing and obsessed a bit before the baby was born about what she wanted to be called. She proposed different grandmotherly titles to the rest of us, as if to test them out and get a sense for how they sounded. We either voted her down or placated her with, “We’ll have to wait and see.” Then my son was born and something remarkable happened.
That grandma was an only child and she had only one child, so her first grandchild instantly became the center of our tiny family universe. She adored him and doted on him in every way a grandmother has a right to. As he got a little older, she fostered one on one teaching moments with him. One ritual was dropping coins into his cowboy boot bank. Every time she visited, she would sit with him at the table, coins in hand, and watch him fat-finger them through his little bank slot. In short order, he associated the money in her hand with who she was as a person. She’d walk through the door and he’d run to her, palms turned upward, begging for money, except it didn’t come out as “money.” It sounded more like “marnie,” and her grandmother-name was born. She became Marnie to all her subsequent grandkids and wore the title with pride, signing it on every birthday card, even becoming Marnie to other friends and family.
I would like it very much if my grandbaby names me. I might continue to privately test the sound of possibilities, but I know this: whatever my new name ends up being will be perfect because when my grandbaby names me, I bet the feeling rivals the coronation of a queen.