We Call Him Pappy

My husband and I are both the oldest of the siblings in our families, and in fact we both have two younger brothers whose ages match up: my younger brother was born the same year as his, and our youngest brothers were also born the same year. My husband and I were the first children in our families to get married, and then the first to have our own children. Our oldest daughter was the first grandchild for both his parents and mine.


There’s a lot to do when you’re getting ready to have a baby, and one thing you never really think about is what you’re going to teach your child to call your parents.


I never called my grandparents anything but “Grandma” and “Grandpa.” Both my mother’s parents are living, but my paternal grandfather died in the spring of the year I was born, so I only ever had one Grandpa. I differentiate my grandmothers by calling one “Grandma” and the other “Grandma Betty.” It isn’t just a name my brothers & I call her, my cousins call her that, too.


It never occurred to me that anyone would call their grandparents something else, and so I never thought that my parents would like to be called anything but that. My in-laws shrugged and said they didn’t mind, “Grandma” and “Grandpa” would be fine. I was brainstorming what my mother would be called when she told me, “I want to be ‘Grandma!’”


Because of the difference in location of our respective parents, it’s easy to keep the Grandmas separate. When we are with my mother-in-law, talking with my daughter about my mother, we call her “NebraskaGrandma.” And when my mother talks to my daughter about my mother-in-law, she says “your Grandma back home in Colorado.” We ran into a little snag when my mother came to visit once, so both of them were in the same house. My daughter didn't bat an eyelash, and continued calling my mother-in-law "Grandma" and gave my mother a new name for the weekend: "Naama."


It wasn’t going to be hard to separate the Grandpas, my father has a clean cut face while my father-in-law has scared his family in the past by shaving off his mustache. My father was the first one to get a smile out of my daughter when she was five weeks old, so we started calling him “SillyGrandpa.” My father-in-law has acquired the title of “MustacheGrandpa.”

That doesn’t quite work very well for keeping them separated in my daughter’s mind, not because she doesn’t realize which one is which but because she knows which Grandma goes with which Grandpa. We have a song we sing about her relatives, the first line of which is “Cora loves her ______ so, so much,” and we substitute a different name of a family member in each time we sing it. One day she was “helping” me make lunch and we were singing. We had just finished singing about her MustacheGrandpa, and I said, “Who shall we sing about now?” “Grandma!” she ordered. “Well, which Grandma do you mean?” I asked, “NebraskaGrandma, or-” “MustacheGrandma!” (Just to clarify, my mother-in-law is a beautiful woman who does not have a mustache.)

We still have trouble sometimes keeping the Grandmas separate, but we don’t get confused about Grandpas, since my father decided what he wanted to be called: Pappy. We thought it was kind of silly at first, but my daughter does sound pretty adorable calling him: “Pappy! Pappy!” This has made it easier to talk to my daughter about her grandparents. When I say, "Shall we go to Grandma's house today?" and she says, "Pappy's house?" I can say, "No, let's go to Grandpa and Grandma's house. We will go to Grandma and Pappy's house another day."

My sister-in-law found a t-shirt for Father’s Day that says “I’m on Granddad Duty.” “Too bad it doesn’t say ‘Pappy’ instead,” she said. I agreed, so I set about making one that would really work.

I can’t wait to see him wear it proudly.


Happy Father’s Day to all the Grandpas, Pappies, Granddads, Papas, & Grandfathers out there, whatever your grandkids like to call you. Thank you for loving us and for spoiling us. We love you.