Terms of Endearment
Terms of endearment vary from family to family. Most parents give these terms to their children when they are babies/toddlers and they stick with them for life. My youngest, answers to “Boo!” When she was a toddler, Monsters, Inc. was the popular Disney movie and everyone always commented on how she reminded them of the character Boo. When my son was an infant, his was “little man.” It is not a name that we can call him today, I think at 18 he would not appreciate it. I know other mothers call their daughters, dolly or princess and many other names.
In my family, it is nothing of the sort. We had nicknames that were not repeatable. Please do not take offense to what’s written here, all these terms are used with much love.
Growing up, my Grandmother always had the oddest terms of endearment. It started when she was a little girl. My Great Grandmother, Mary, always called Grandma her “sh*tpot.” When Grandma started her family, she called her second daughter “sh*tpot” as well. Lucky for me, I took over the name when I was born. I never understood it, or knew the reason she called me this crazy name. When I had kids, my youngest became the “sh*pot” as well. When I called my Grandma to talk, she would ask about all the kids, but take a few extra minutes to find out about “my sh*tpot.”
Becca (my youngest) gets a kick out of it. When we talk about Granny, she always asks “is that the one that calls me the bad word?”
I have one cousin who had her first child almost four years ago, she told me that her children would “never be called sh*tpot!”
I laughed and said “we will see.”
When her daughter was about two, she called me one day and said “ugh, she is such a sh*tpot!”
All I could do was laugh…
With Grandma’s recent passing, I was finally told about how the name started with my Grandma as a child and it has moved on to each generation. You just got to laugh at the craziness of it.
Grandma’s other favorite term of endearment is a**hole! If she called you that, it meant nothing but love! She called me that in every conversation we had. I called her, crazy lady! She has told me for years that we were cut from the same cloth and that is why we get along so well. With her Lung Cancer diagnosis a few weeks before her death, we had a discussion where she told me that it was time I take on the title of Crazy Lady. I replied sadly, that I was not ready to hold the title alone, but I would be happy to share it with her. Unfortunately, she won the argument!
The day before she died, she was talking with one of my cousins and telling him about how we got along and I was giving her a hard time about it, laughing at how she wanted me to have her title as the crazy lady. She looked at me and laughed, and said “get out of here you a**hole.” Now I know most would take offense from this statement, but I know she said it with nothing but love! This was the last thing she ever said to me and I will never forget it.
What are some of the terms your family used?
