Grandparents Get Named Too

My brother and I with Grandpa and Grandma D'Elia 1950

Last Christmas, I didn’t know I would become a grandmother later this year. Now, a few days before Easter, I do. Puts a different slant on a family holiday – winter or spring.

First, there’s the whole Easter Bunny thing. “Look what he left here,” I’ll be saying next year, to a baby, blissfully oblivious to the cause and effect connected to a basket of eggs, candied and hard-boiled. In time he will learn to anticipate the sweets and playthings that can fit in a tiny bushel. In more time, he may even roll his eyes at his grandmother’s proclivity towards overindulging him with treats. But then, what’s a Grammy for?

There, I said it: Grammy.

People want to know, you know. The way, pre-wedding,  they wanted to know what my future son-in-law would call me, they want to know what Patrick Lawrence will call me, his Mom’s Mom, when we are grandmother and grandson. I remember when someone asked my dad that, near forty years ago. His son was about to become a father. Dad answered, “Mr. Baione.” He was going for a laugh. Elicited a few raised eyebrows too. In seemingly no time, he became Grandpa Baione to each of my brother’s four children. The same four who dubbed my mom “Grammy” through their child and adulthoods.

These revered designations carried on when my daughter and son were born – sort of. Em certainly took the cue from her older cousins, but when the now, mommy-to-be, tried to repeat her cousins’ term of endearment for my mother,  she forsook the first syllable and double-stated the second. Thus Grammy became Mimi to my daughter and son.

What will my grandson call me?

Whatever he wants.