I’m My Own Grandpa...

"I'm My Own Grandpa" written by Dwight Latham and Moe Jaffe, performed by Lonzo and Oscar in 1947 (made even more famous by Tom Arnold in The Stupids)
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Shortly after my mother passed away, Shonda’s grandmother called one day to get my father’s phone number. She said that she just wanted to ask him how he was doing and see if he was okay. I thought that it was a very sweet gesture, because I could tell that she was genuinely concerned. However, if you know me, I was quick to start cracking the jokes.

I mused to Shonda about how she was probably going to test the waters and see if she could get him to ask her out on a date. She said, “Oh my…what if my grandma married your dad?!” That got us started on all of the mind boggling changes that would be felt down through our respective family trees.

Shonda’s grandmother would now be my step-mother. This means that my mother-in-law would now be my step-sister causing my wife to become my niece by marriage and have to call me “uncle”. Shonda would also have to call her father-in-law “grandpa”. As we continued to dig deeper into the issue, we also realized that Shonda’s mother would now become her aunt due to the fact that her mom was also my sister (even if only by marriage). It would also stand to reason that my own children would now become my great niece and nephews, because technically I would become their mother’s uncle. This would allow me to spoil them like only an uncle can and relieve me of all my fatherly obligations as far as their upbringing was concerned. And not only that, the more we thought about it, we realized that our children would also become their own cousins because they would be both my niece and nephews as well as my own children. Adding this type of duality to children so young could never be a good thing.

In the end, after carefully weighing all the pros and cons, we decided that it would be best if my father and Shonda’s grandmother stayed “just friends” and only saw each other during the holidays.