Today is my Grandma’s birthday. She’s probably got on her sequin beret drinking a scotch and talking shit somewhere in the atmosphere. Nana was a trip, not at all the type of Grandma that I would have wished for but the one I got. My father’s mother wasn’t very different. No Tollhouse cookies for my ass…

Now my kid has two Grandmother’s who dote on him to levels unheard of. But my Mother… she takes it to another level. She calls him any random combination of sugar, cake, apple, dumpling, pie, love, biscuit, fantasy, and scoop usually with guy or boy at the end. So…

sugar cake boy

Grandma’s love biscuit

sugar pie guy

scoop of love sugar

apple dumpling fantasy …

I mean I could go on. The child is 6 feet 4 inches, almost 16, and she is calling him “Grandma’s 31 Flavors of Joy Everlasting.” And he eats it up. It’s like he’s cradled to her bosom looking back at me like… “HA! She likes me better!” “HA! She sings commercials to me like lullabies, what you get?” “HA! This bosom was once your refrigerator and now my head rests upon thee!” You can see the joy seeping from his on punishment for missing homework assignment pores. And while Grandma might give it to him, curse him for missing homework, she follows up by sending him $20 in cashapp to Door Dash himself a bag of Doritos. This dude…

The Importance of Grandmas

So my Grandmas… well… not exactly pioneers of perfect Grandma behaviors, milk and cookies and shit. Nope. I had a “Nana” and a “Mother” both very unGrandma like and legit untouched by the Grandma cupid, you know that little fat baby with the arrow that goes around changing folks from “mama said f@#% them kids” into “grandma’s sugar and spice.” I mean I wasn’t horribly scarred, but it was obvious to me that my Grandma’s were different.

Nana was cool, sometimes, but in limited spans of time… and then it was like she had had too good a visit with you so she had to get ignant, ruin it. I was prepared for as this was her thing, posing as Eve… really a snake. She’d ask you to sit on her lap to tell you that you were getting fat… or make you a ice cream float and then tell you you really need an apple. Ain’t nobody eating your apple old lady. Nana was like the bully I never had at school… it was rather irritating. I eventually just learned to ignore her until she attempted that same mess with my kid. Then I let her have it. Dang, you can’t even get it right once we add a “great” to your Grandma. Geez.

Similarly Mother was equally difficult …for me. I was Nana’s only grandchild, but I had cousins and brothers and sister’s on my father’s side… and some she seemed to like more than other’s. While Nana was equally negative with everyone, Mother seemed to favor the underdog. I’ve always been an overachiever… so she would take it upon herself to remind me of some old mistake or failure I made every time she saw me. “In 1982 you didn’t…” sure to point out my flaw but never her own… of living in the past. As a kid when I wanted to go home because she made me sleep in what I thought was a haunted room alone, she remarked that I didn’t like her as much as my other Grandmother. Nope, not true… I’m not particularly fond of either of you. 🤷🏽‍♀️ Similarly when she pulled the same mess with my kid, I just pretty much left her alone. Like we give you every chance to be great…

I missed the baking cookies, warm and fuzzy feelings, pulling me to her bosom and call me “unicorn frosting of my heart” kind of Grandma… but I got what I got. The one taught me to always consider others and find a fella who would dance with me, and the other to follow my dreams so I didn’t fault others for following theirs. I’ll take those lessons as their pet names and hot cocoa on Saturday nights with the extra big marshmallows. We don’t always get what we want, but we get what we need.

In the meantime, my mother has texted my son that he’s the “wing beneath her butterfly wings and the stars in her lilloquoi moonlit sky, with sugar cake and sweet scones dancing the waltz to Lil Uzi Vert and Travis Scott.” She also blasts rap songs, so that’s a major plus! She got those Super Grandma Powers!