Just a few months in the past my toddler appeared up from his cartoon, which had centered round the principle character’s grandparents. “I don’t have a grandma,” he informed me in a regretful tone, a solemn expression forming on his little face. Strictly talking, he is proper. He does not have a “grandma.” He has a Noni, a GoGo, a Pop-Pop and one plain ol’ Grandpa.
While my siblings and I stiffly addressed our grandparents as “Grandma” and “Grandpa,” including their respective final names to differentiate one set from the opposite, these conventional phrases appear to have fallen out of favor. Granny and Nana are out, Gammy (see: Adrienne Banfield Norris, mom of Jada Pinkett Smith and grandmother to Jaden and Willow) and GoGo (Goldie Hawn’s “glam-ma” moniker of alternative) are in. And why be “Grandfather” once you may be “Granddude,” Lester Holt’s most popular nickname?
“I like it because it acknowledges that I’m a senior — that I’m the ‘grand’ — but ‘dude’ is kind of about the fact that hopefully I’ve still got a little gas in the tank,” the NBC Nightly News host defined to Yahoo Life of his choice to go towards the grampy grain in an interview final 12 months.
Indeed, most of the grandparents Yahoo Life spoke to cited age as an excuse to create a enjoyable different; they merely did not see themselves as being sufficiently old to reply to Grandpa or Gran. Gigi, Lolly or Pop, alternatively …
“I was never one for following tradition, so when I became a grandmother at the age of 45, I knew that I didn’t want to be called Grandma,” says Jill Taylor, a homesteader based mostly in Tulsa, Okla., who’s now a 50-year-old grandmother of two. “It just felt too old for me. Instead, I decided to go with a more modern name: Glam.”
Taylor says her household pushed again at first, considering Glam was “weird.” But the nickname caught on, and it is what her grandchildren now name her, a lot to her delight.
“I have to say, I quite enjoy it!” she says. “It makes me feel young and hip, which is exactly how I want to feel as a grandmother.”
After Shelley Mason’s first picks — Aunty, Aunty-ma and Mamma2 — had been vetoed by her daughter, the Greensboro, N.C., native settled on Yaya.
“I was a cool, cute, sexy 40-year-old when I was blessed with a grandchild,” Mason, now 47, tells Yahoo Life. “I am way too cute and hip to be a grandma.”
“There was no way I was going to be called Grandma,” agrees Los Angeles public relations professional Marla White. “That just brought to mind white hair, nylons and flat shoes. So not me.”
Instead, she’s Glama, a reputation she’s even had immortalized on her automotive’s self-importance plate. Her three grandchildren (“glam babes”) are all for it.
“I will never forget when my 5-year-old glamdaughter Avery tried to correct her little friend, who asked her if I was her ‘grandma,'” White says. “She very politely stated, ‘No, that is my ‘GA-LAMMMMMA!'”
But there are other more practical considerations at play too, given today’s modern family. Blended families may have more than the standard two sets of grandparents, requiring a little creativity and wordplay to give each person a unique moniker.
And then there are the sentimental backstories behind names like Bubba or Mimi — a grandchild’s affectionate babble, a tribute to a loved one. Karen Dennis, a healthcare publicist based in Hollywood, Fla., had always planned to go by Grandma, but when her own mother died eight months before Dennis welcomed her first grandchild, it felt too “sad” to share the name. Instead, Dennis took inspiration from a beloved book series by children’s author Tomie dePaola.
“My mom was a children’s librarian and loved the book Strega Nona — which means ‘grandma witch’ in Italian, with ‘grandma’ being ‘nona,'” the 66-year-old grandmother of three says. “So I opted to be called Nona, which gives me happy memories of my mom and highlights my joy of being a grandparent.”
And Carson Krislov Quinn’s first pregnancy four years ago paved the way for her dad’s unique nickname.
“When I was pregnant with my first, my father would ‘correspond’ with the baby via Morse code,” the Austin-based Zindsey Media founder tells Yahoo Life. “He’d either say ‘Beep beep beep’ to my belly or send me text messages with code that I’d have to decipher via an app I downloaded. The name stuck, and now the kids call him Beep — it’s easy to say and cheerfully squeal.”
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