What's in a Name?

“What will he call you?”  friends and family have asked since our grandson was born last week.  Even before his birth I was getting the same question.  It hadn’t occurred to me to have a ready answer.  Nor do I have one yet.   After all, Austin Frederick Aaronson is only a few days old and won’t be calling me anything for a while.  Yet it has started me thinking…

When I visited with my mother for tea several afternoons ago, I mentioned my dilemma of what to call myself now that I’m a grandmother.  She began to talk of Mommy and Poppy, my great grandparents.  They lived two houses from 1242 43rd Street in Des Moines, Iowa where she and her brother and sister grew up.  I have seen photos of Virginia Barnes McCormick for whom my mother was named. And I grew up with the stories of this genuinely kind Victorian lady and descriptions of how beautiful she was – slim, and tall with translucent gray eyes. My mother invoked this grandmother when she taught us to always “do and say the kindest thing in the kindest way”. She called herself Mommy and Grandfather McCormick was Poppy, perhaps out of vanity.  Another name might have been a label for an old lady and that was not whom she thought wanted to be.

A few days after Austin was born, Art came home and told me, “I am dadushka and you are babushka.”  He had just been to teach his Russian group English and said they had had a lively talk about the new addition to our family.  All I could think of were the traditional Russian folktales I used to read aloud to children in my school library and the many colorful illustrations of buxom women in full skirts with old-fashioned scarves tied around their hair.  I don’t think I’m a babushka!  On the other hand, my Mexican student, Angelica, whom I meet every week to teach and converse with in English was happy about my news and called me abuelita.  I like it because it has roots in my Latin America upbringing that is part of who I am.  But it’s a mouthful to say easily!  I often think of our German friends from Vermont who are way ahead of us in number of grandchildren but simply are Oma and Omi.  How easy those German names are for children to say.

When Hayden was growing up my parents were always Grandma and Grandpa and Art’s mother was Grandma Ceil.  It worked.  But I still refer to my mother as Grandma when I talk to Hayden so how can I be Grandma too?  No, Grandma is my mother and always will be.

It amazes me that as I become a grandmother I can Google names for grandmother and get hundreds of suggestions and people who feel as I do “Grandmother is too formal sounding and Grandma sounds too old.”  In an article I found online I learned that “the Boomer generation is loath to admit to aging….they want to be grandparents…just don’t call them that.”  Is that me?  Evidently it is.  There is more discussion on this topic than there ever has been and polls show that fewer children call their grandparents the traditional names than ever before.  My mother even suggested “Just be Kristina!”  But I’m not sure.

So perhaps I simply need to meet my grandson next week, hold him, talk to him, and my becoming a grandmother will seem more real.  In the meantime I will probably try out names to myself and one will just slide into place one of these days.