There are stories we tell again and again in our families. Some are new and still pliable. We massage them with each telling, adjusting the cadence, the emphasis, cutting the faff and deadweight, highlighting the bits that get laughs, lifting the poignant pieces, raising our eyebrows at the clever parts, beckoning our audience toward understanding. “Get it?” we’re asking. “Do you feel the heft and shape of it?” “Have I got the telling right yet? Did I convey the humor? The meaning?” And then there are the stories worn with time, smooth around edges; stories that fit in our hands like river rocks, tumbled and familiar. Stories we’ve told dozens of time. More.
I wonder regularly at this human ritual of ours. What we’re hoping to convey. What we’re hoping to learn. Why we choose the stories we do to share on repeat with audiences we know have already heard them. We want, I suspect, to shape reality. To make a truth. To put structure and scafolding around events so they will morph from chaos into order. To mold moments of time into pillars and columns we can lean against as real and reliable and true. To enshrine joy. To understand pain. To make meaning from the miasma. To learn, ultimately, who we are, piece by piece.
When my grandmother was born–and this is a story I’ve told my whole life–her mother let her sisters name her. They were older by a significant margin, perhaps 15 and 17 at the time my grandmother, a surprise, came along. They picked the prettiest name they knew: Betty June. And my grandmother despised it. Loathed it. Hated it with the fiery passion of a thousand suns. In all the time I knew her, she never used it. She went, reluctantly, by B.J. for much of her life, then Bea or just B, which sounded like a diminutive of a much more dignified Beatrice, and was, therefore, an acceptable compromise with the name she’d been given. And then, in 1973, I was born, and I was called Elizabeth, a regal name that delighted her as a dedicated Anglophile who, for decades, faithfully clipped and scrapbooked every mention of the British royal family from every newspaper and magazine she could get her hands on. She promptly changed her own name to Elizabeth, as well, and that is how I came to be the only person I know whose grandmother is named after her.
I’ve paid attention for a long time to the stories my family tells. To the stories I tell. I am intrigued by the hidden meanings. By the deeper motivations. And so, when I notice myself telling a story over and over, I’ve started to consciously ask myself why. What am I shaping? What am I trying to understand? What do I want to codify and capture?
My grandmother was, like all of us who are made out of human, a complicated creature. She was at once imaginative, artistic, petty, witty, smart, charming, and childish. She was also audacious and a little silly while longing to be grand, a combination that makes me feel a little sad for her and retroactively proud. She was poor and would have excelled at being pretentious if anyone had given her half a chance. So I suppose I tell the story of her naming herself after me to highlight her sauciness and defiance. She both wanted to be something she was not and refused to be who others insisted she was. She lived at a crossroads so many of us understand; yearning to love ourselves as we already are and remake ourselves completely.
Lately, I find myself telling my friends, again and again, how difficult it is to choose my grandma name, and the part I like to emphasize is how very much I do not want to choose my own. A grandma name is, I feel, something that should be chosen for me by my grandchild. A name bestowed. A name gifted from the child destined to change my world.
It’s not, I am always quick to note, that I feel it’s wrong for other grandparents to pick their monikers. Not at all. I can understand the desire to choose the label by which you may be known for the remainder of your life, especially by those most precious to you. In fact, most grandparents I know did choose their names, and I begrudge them nothing.
Still, I am reticent. Partly, I’ve realized, because I don’t want to be robbed of this first gift of grandparenting. Partly, too, because I love the risk of releasing control, something I enjoy more the older I become. After all, when your name is dependent on the musings and speech impediments of toddlers, you can as easily be Grumpy as Grandpa or Crapper as Grandma, which tickles me. You may be Lovey or Lumpy, Posie or Poopie, Nana or Nono. It’s the roulette of epithets. The ultimate handle gamble.
Chandler (my son-in-law and the father-to-be), however, iss having none of my refusal to participate in naming myself. “Fine,” he says in all my retellings of this story, eyes twinkling with mirth and mayhem, “then we will teach him to call you Grandma Meth which rhymes with Beth.” And then, after Greg appropriately adopts Grandolf as his grandfather name–dual nods to his gray beard and love of Lord of the Rings–Chandler revises his threat. “Actually,” he proposes, “we will call you Precious.”
And so, faced with the equally hideous choices of Grandma Meth or Precious, I am forced to reckon with a name.
It is harder work than I imagine, friends, thinking about who I want to be.
Who do I want to be in this third act of life? No longer maiden. No longer matron. Entering my powerful, embodied crone era, with all its wit and grace and wisdom, who am I now? And who do I want to be?
I turn to friends both on and offline, and the suggestions are perfect.
Alisa suggests we ditch Grandolf entirely and choose Gollum for Greg so I can retain Precious for the perfect matchy Lord of the Rings (LOTR) names. Gollum and Precious. I die.
Sarah reminds me that Tolkien refers to older hobbits as gaffers and gammers, and I really, really hope some LOTR-loving future grandparents pick Gaffer and Gammer as their grandparent names, because I think that’s genius.
Laney wins for most poignant LOTR-related suggestion with Grandma Goldberry, which others turn into Gramberry or Granberry; strong, beautiful, immortal spirit of the River Withywindle. Gorgeous. Obviously.
Heidi rallies for Grambie, like Grammie, but with a b for Beth, which resonates with me. And several others have ideas along the same lines: Grandma B, Granny Bea, Gma Bee, Gambee.
It is that last to which I return again and again. Granbee? Grambee? Gambee? It feels… so close. Almost right. I text it to a friend. I keep it running in the background of my mind. Then the nurse attending Abby’s labor asks what I will be called. I toss Granbee at her, and she writes it on the whiteboard as GRANDBEE alongside Abby’s and Chandler’s names, where it looks… not quite right.
Abby is in the very early stages of labor. I tell myself I still have time, but I know it’s running out.
In a labor lull, I erase the D, turning GRANDBEE to GRAN BEE, which improves nothing.
So I keep erasing, every letter like the shedding of skin, until I am left with BEE.
That feels better. Less itchy.
And then BE.
I breathe a full deep breath.
And finally just B.
Oh, I think, relaxed. At ease. Oh, there I am. That’s me.
I’m B.
B as in Beth.
B as in bee, switching between queen and honey and worker and bumble. Mother and sweetness-bringer and laborer and chaotic joy-maker.
B as in “god, what an absolute B.” I mean, sometimes.
B as in Bea, named after my grandmother who was named after me, bringing us full circle another half-century on.
B as in betwixt and between, both/and, all at once.
B as in becoming, both the act of growth and the acknowledged beauty already upon us. I am becoming. I am becoming.
And B, in the end, as in to simply be. Enough as I already am. And who I’ve been all along.
It’s a name to live into. It’s a name to live up to.
Waving in the dark, as always,
B
