‘I refuse to be called grandma, it makes me sound old’

At 73, supermodel Twiggy has rejected the term “grandma” and says she is known to her grandchildren as “Mimi”. In an interview this week, she said the children’s other grandmother is known by the more traditional term, while she gets something more unusual.

The British model is not the only celebrity who has sought alternatives to grandma. The actress Blythe Danner, mother to Gwyneth Paltrow and grandmother to Apple and Moses, goes by “Woof”. “My mom’s hot and she didn’t want to be called grandma,” Paltrow explained. “So she kept trying to make the Woof thing stick. It’s even her email address.” Apple, however, renamed her Lalo.

Actor Goldie Hawn writes in her memoir that she didn’t want her grandson Ryder to call her grandmother, a “word that had so many connotations of old age and decrepitude.” Instead, “My son Oliver decided I should be called ‘Glam-Ma,’ which I thought was quite brilliant and made us all laugh so hard.”

Vogue editor Anna Wintour is known as Anna – “Just Anna!”. Kris Jenner, Kim Kardashian’s mum, has gone for the off-beat “Lovey.” She said in an interview with People magazine: “At first I was grandma, and all of a sudden I didn’t like the way that sounded, my mom had a friend called Lovey and I thought that was the cutest name.”

Twiggy in 2016, known to her grandchildren as ‘Mimi’ (Photo: Chris Jackson/Getty)

There is a wave of women refusing to be called grandmas, and they’re not all rich and famous.

Edwina, a 71-year-old grandmother from Oxfordshire, tells i: “When my granddaughter was born,” she says, “my daughter and I had a conversation about what to call me. I really didn’t want to be granny because I don’t look like a granny, and neither of my daughters had called their grandmas anything other than their first names. They also called their dad and me by our first names, as soon as they could pronounce them!

“However, my own name was a bit of a mouthful for my granddaughter and she needed to call me something. I’d been reading a memoir by a Norwegian writer whose grandmother was a force of nature, so that’s where the Norwegian term mormor came from, and that’s what she calls me. My granddaughter’s other grandma is nana, so even if I’d wanted to be nonna it wouldn’t have worked.”

Why has she gone down this route? “There’s definitely that sense of not wanting to be seen as an old lady, with all the connotations that has. It was also about wanting to avoid the “I’m going to my nan’s for Sunday tea” thing. So “grandma” wouldn’t ever have been fine, and even now my daughter calls me mormor and I quite like it. It’s the force of nature thing, and the fact it describes the relationship we have. My granddaughter really gets that, and that it’s a Scandinavian word. She’s nearly six so fascinated by places as well as relationships.”

Jessie Wales, a PR and communications specialist, tells i that her grandmother and mother both also rejected the grandma title. “When you become a grandma, you are automatically catapulted into this grey hair and glasses category,” she says. “My French grandma was very stylish and glamorous. The term mamie – grandma in French – wasn’t something she was ready for but neither did she want her grandchildren to call her by her first name Jaqueline as that was a bit too removed. So she went with Mamyline. We always loved explaining to people the story of how she was called Mamyline as it was often asked.” When Wales had her own children, her mother who was 52 at the time, took inspiration from her mother, Mamyline.

“My mum had also wanted to follow in those footsteps – plus with my mum only being 20 years older than me, she definitely wasn’t ready for the granny title, nor does she look anything like one, as we all have a picture in our heads of what a grandma looks like.” Her grandchildren call her Nanibelle; a hybrid of her name Isabelle and Nanny. “It gave her her own unique name,” she says.

Isabelle Lewis (Nanibelle) aged 60 and her daughter Jessie Wales, at Jessie’s 40th birthday, and on holiday (Photo: Supplied)

Georgia Witkin’s The Modern Grandparent’s Handbook lists 251 grandparental names, divided by gender into three categories: Traditional, Trendy and Playful. These include terms for only the bravest souls out there: “Sweetums, G-dawg, Faux Pa or Grandude.”

A call out to grandparents reveals that many have come up with their own nicknames. A grandma with no Italian heritage but “a deep love of family holidays in Tuscany” calls herself nonna. A former social worker in London called Mary Smith tells i she is known as Apples by her grandchildren because she didn’t want to be called Granny Smith. There’s a grandma called Janet known as Granite, there’s a granddad called PopPop, and a woman who has gone back to her Jewish ancestry and calls herself Bubbe, which is grandma in Yiddish.

Columnist Paula Span wrote in 2018 in the New York Times; “My friend Ellen Edwards Villa sent her mother a “grandma” charm for her charm bracelet when her first grandchild was born. The gift came back by return mail. Her mother, a mere 69, objected that she wasn’t old enough to be a grandma. She insisted her grandchildren call her Sweetie Pie, instead, and they did.”

Then again, a grandparent’s best laid plans for a new nickname can go seriously awry. Eva Watkins, a 66-year-old former nurse, tells i that she tried to be known as Oma, because of her half-German heritage.

“My grandson was having none of it,” she says, “and started calling me ‘normal grandma’ as opposed to his ‘great grandma’ who was still alive. He’d be shouting ‘normal grandma!’ at me in the park, and people would look at us strangely.”