The first time my grandson called me “Linda,” everyone laughed. I laughed too because I honestly thought it was cute and figured he’d start calling me Grandma in a few weeks. Then my sister smiled and said, “No, sweetheart… that’s Grandma.” I’ll never forget what happened next.
My grandson burst into tears. He started screaming so hard that my son had to carry him into another room, while my daughter-in-law kept hugging him and whispering, “It’s okay… nobody’s going to make you say it.” At the time, I thought he was just overtired. Looking back, that should’ve been the moment I realized something wasn’t right.
I kept telling myself he’d grow out of it. But weeks turned into months, and months turned into almost a year. Every time he saw me, he’d run over, hug my legs, smile up at me, and happily say, “Linda!” I had dreamed about hearing him call me Grandma ever since my son told me they were expecting a baby. It probably sounds silly, but I couldn’t wait for that moment. Instead, after almost every family dinner, I’d get in my car, drive home, and sometimes cry because I honestly started believing it would never happen.
Everyone kept telling me not to take it personally. “He’s just little.” “He’ll grow out of it.” I tried to believe them, but what hurt the most wasn’t my grandson. It was my daughter-in-law. I’ll admit something I’m not proud of. After almost a year, I started wondering if my daughter-in-law had taught him to call me by my first name. I hated myself for thinking it because she’d always been kind to me, but I couldn’t come up with any other explanation.
One Sunday, after another family dinner, my grandson hugged me goodbye, smiled up at me, and said, “Bye, Linda!” I waited until he ran off to play before quietly following my daughter-in-law into the kitchen. “I need to ask you something,” I said. She looked at me, and before I even finished my question, I could tell she already knew what I was going to ask. “Why have you never corrected him?”
She stood there in silence for several long seconds. Then she looked toward the living room where my grandson was laughing. When she finally looked back at me, her eyes filled with tears. “Please…” she whispered. “Please don’t ever ask him to call you Grandma.”
And in that moment, she shared with me the truth.
She told me that when my grandson was very little, she had gone through cancer treatment. It had been an awful, frightening time for their family. She spent months in and out of hospitals, and my grandson had been too young to understand what was happening. He remembered nurses calling her by formal names, and he started to think that being called something different meant someone was sick or might disappear. In his little mind, “Linda” was the name that kept me safe. It was the name he associated with me being here, with me being myself, with me not being taken away.
My daughter-in-law said she had never corrected him because every time someone tried, he would panic. He wasn’t refusing to call me Grandma because he didn’t love me. He was scared that changing my name might somehow change me too. He thought that if he started calling me Grandma, I might become another person he couldn’t recognize, or worse, someone he could lose.
I sat there stunned, tears filling my eyes as she explained that he loved me so much, he was trying to protect me in the only way a little boy knew how. All those months I had been hurting because I thought I wasn’t being given the right title, and all that time he had been using the name he believed would keep me close.