Words that Stop You
Say that again
My whole life, I’ve wanted to add a disclaimer when I use the word “grandmother.”
“You know that’s just the generic term,” I want to lean in and whisper to people. “It doesn’t fully describe my grandmothers.”
It does not capture Grandmom, who handed down her monogram and penchant for correct spelling and grammar, her love of snail mail and always having ice cream in your freezer. And it doesn’t capture Mamaw, either, with her questions about exactly when I had a test at school so she could pray for me right then, her “Ladybug” and “Little Bit” nicknames for my sister and me, her easy laugh that ends in a happy sigh.
I feel similarly now when I say “the kids.” One of my postpartum-induced1 tiny sadnesses after Sally was born was that we didn’t have two kids of the same gender and thus wouldn’t be able to say “the boys” or “the girls” when referring to them.
Isn’t that the stupidest thing you ever heard?
But “the girls” was such a phrase in my house growing up — both in how my parents referred to us and how people saw us in our community. The Baird girls! Hilariously, the most common way I remember “the girls” being used outside of our family was by Midge Horner, an older lady at our church, who always said things like, “you Baird girls have such good hair,” or “you Baird girls wear the cutest dresses.”
So shallow. So sweet! I imagined myself having a little same-gender set just like that.
Would I swap a kid now to have a matching pair? Absolutely not, of course. And my hormones have now leveled out enough that I no longer lament the loss of that particular phrase. But I still want to add extra context when I use it: My kids, the Frevert kids, are special.
Calling Tanner “my husband” jolted me for a solid year. I felt like I was playing house, pretending to be a grownup, every time I referred to him in that way. Am I really allowed to have a husband? Did you ask my mom? Did she say it’s okay?!
Almost seven years into marriage, I have gotten over this hangup, too. We don’t really celebrate Valentine’s Day and had a fairly typical day on the holiday this year. We were out walking our dogs with ~the kids~ in tow when we ran into some neighbors we hadn’t met yet. The woman and I were leading the conversation, sharing our names first, and then we each did the requisite turn to bring in the men: “And this is my husband.”
That phrase is so routine to me now, borderline mundane. But maybe Cupid swooped down on this particular afternoon: As we walked on after the exchange, I was transported back to that first year of marriage, both of us working from home2 in our little house in Arlington.
“Yeah, my husband has the upstairs office,” I’d tell a coworker on Zoom. “My husband made homemade pasta last night. My husband and I biked into the city on Saturday.”
It was a comfort catchphrase, marking me as someone who was walking through life with someone by her side.
The only thing better than saying “my husband” was hearing him upstairs echoing back the term’s twin: “my wife.”
In other words, insane.
The pandemic hit two weeks before our first anniversary. Good thing we liked each other!