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Pop Culture

Grandma challenges the status quo by daring to wear whatever she wants

“It’s just a little nana belly.”

Representative photo by RDNE Stock

Grandma challenges status quo by dressing how she pleases.

As people age, society expects them to fit into a neat little box of what is deemed appropriate. This can be anything from what job an older person has to their style of clothing to how they speak. Societal rules like these often go unspoken—that is, until you break them. That's when people have a lot to say about things that are seemingly no one else's business.

Things like women over 50 having brightly colored hair, wearing tall heels or having hair down their backs. Apparently women over a certain age are all supposed to go to a salon to get the granny cut and wear clothes that identify them as over an arbitrary age. But older women are starting to rebel against the status quo and looking fabulous while doing it.

Arlinda, who runs the page funkingafter50 on Instagram explains to Style Like U that due to her dressing in styles she likes, people often seem surprised. She has gotten some stares but she takes those moments and uses them as a teaching moment in a way.

Arlinda has no interest in keeping up with what society has to say about how women her age dress. "They say women of a certain age shouldn't wear things that are above our knee. You see my face, why can't I show my 66-year-old knees if I can show my 66-year-old face," she ponders to Style Like U.

But it's not just knees she's showing. The grandmother wears crop tops, bold colored bras that peek from under her shirts and brightly colored lipstick. It honestly looks like she's having a blast with her style, commenters also agree.


"Fly girls don’t have an expiration baby. When you got it, you got it," one person cheers.

"She’s eating the younger girlies up in the fashion department! I love this," another gushes.

"No explanation needed Queen!!! Love your body and teach others to love theirs. There ain’t two the same and we are all gorgeous queens. I’m almost 40 and trying to have this amount of self love and I’m getting there, but you are an inspiration," someone writes.

"Honey, she is my new muse. Don’t want to wait until I’m 66 to have this level of self-love," someone else shares.

Arlinda is an inspiration to a whole generation of women just by being herself. The amount of joy she exudes from wearing whatever makes her feel good is contagious. There's nothing wrong with a little "nana belly" according to the fashionista and it seems plenty of others agree. Life is short, wear the crop top.

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To help her gay son, this amazing mom carried and gave birth to her own granddaughter.

Like many gay couples, Matthew Eledge and his husband Elliot Dougherty desperately wanted to have their own children. But being in a same-sex relationship called for them to be a little more creative in how they achieved that dream.

At 59 years old, Matthew’s mother, Cecile Eledge, was supportive and excited to be a grandma. So excited — that she offered to serve as the surrogate and carry her own grandchild.

While it began as sort of a family joke, eventually the idea grew into something inexplicably wonderful. Eledge and Dougherty’s daughter Uma Louise.

"It just seemed like a really beautiful sentiment on her part," Elliott told the BBC. "She's such a selfless woman."

However, the fertility specialist, Dr. Carolyn Maud Doherty,  listed it as a realistic possibility. So she had Cecile come in for a few tests, all of which she passed.

“She’s 61 years old and has lower blood pressure than the rest of us,” Matthew told Buzzfeed News.

“It’s important for people to note that not every 60-year-old is in good enough health to be a surrogate. There are probably only a handful of people across the country who can do this — only a handful of people who have done it,” Doherty told Buzzfeed News.

Cecile got pregnant after the first embryo transfer (Matthew’s sperm and an egg from Elliot's sister Lea), and on March 25th, she gave birth (naturally) to a 5 pound 13 ounce baby girl.

Their journey to becoming a family was not without struggle though. Elliot and Matthew live in Omaha, Nebraska, where they were no strangers to discrimination.

It’s one of many places where there is no non-discrimination legislation in place to ensure LGBTQ individuals have equal access to employment, housing, education and other resources without being targeted for their orientation/gender identity.

Eledge was even dismissed from his job upon announcing his upcoming marriage to Dougherty years ago. Thankfully his students fought for him, but it shouldn’t have come to that.

Similarly, same sex couples in Nebraska weren’t allowed to act as foster parents until 2017 after a ban was lifted.

The road to parenthood is long and arduous for millions of folks who desire to have children. But for same-sex couples, it’s often paved with more obstacles. When paired with social barriers and a lack of legislation, LGBTQ individuals have to fight two times as hard for their right to parent.

Surrogacy, as Matthew and Elliott found, is a potential solution.

For many same-sex couples like Eledge and Dougherty — and many hetero couples as well — surrogacy can make parenting a biological child a reality.  

It’s not surprising it’s become increasingly common.

In the last 17 years, more than 18,400 infants were born via gestational carriers like Cecile.

More and more, gay male couples have begun using surrogacy as a way to have their own biological children. The types of surrogates used range widely — some go through agencies, others find help through family members and friends, like Matthew and Elliott did — but the dream is the same; a chance at biological parenthood.

That said, IVF — which is what prospective parents have to do when they decide to pursue surrogacy — is expensive and therefore limiting in terms of who can really pursue it as an option.

So while LGBT equality is on the horizon, there are still many obstacles in the way, especially when it comes to becoming parents.

We can get closer by making things like health care, family planning, housing, employment and education more accessible, but most importantly, by ensuring each state offers legal protection from discrimination for all.

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America is falling in love with this adorable haunted house grandma.

You cautiously follow a dark hallway into a cramped, cinder block room.

Through the dim lighting, you can see that it looks to be a hospital room of some kind. On one side, an elderly patient lies lifeless, strapped to a gurney. (It's just a doll, but still — it's super creepy.)

Then you see her. An old woman, sitting in a wheelchair wearing a floral robe. She's bludgeoning a nurse with a bloody wrench as she wails: "You can't make me eat any more peas and carrots! I won't do it!"

Mary-Lou Williams knows her way around a wrench. All photos by Kevin Williams, used with permission.

If you're me, you run screaming from the premises and never return.

But this actually happens every night at the Warehouse of Fear in Siloam Springs, Arkansas, one of the areas most popular Halloween attractions.

That haunted house grandma is no teenager in makeup, though. She's Mary Lou-Williams, a local 93-year-old who knows how to have a good time.

2016 marks her fifth year as an actress with the haunted house, which her son, Kevin, helps manage.

She's not the world's biggest Halloween fan, but when her son asked her to help out, she figured, why not? "When you get older like I am, anything you can do, you better hop at the chance," she said.

The whole, twisted gang. Mary-Lou is right-center in the red pants.

During the first year of the attraction, Mary-Lou played an unassuming women in a quiet but spooky living room scene. Her feet rested on a bear skin rug. The bear, by the way, had killed her character's husband. And you were going to be next.

This year, Mary-Lou has finally graduated from merely uttering cryptic things to haunted house goers. Now, she's the one swinging the wrench, and she's giving it everything she's got.

"They'll be some of them so scared, they don't want to go into the next room," she joked. "It's just fun."

Murderous nursing home patient might be Mary-Lou's oddest job to date, but her life story is anything but boring.

In 2015, Mary-Lou played the role of a mental patient at the Warehouse of Fear.

She worked in factories most of her life, she said, including a cannery, then a muffler shop. Later, she found work at a laundromat. In between, there were various gigs loading and unloading packages. She worked until she was 78 years old.

In other words, Mary-Lou is not a woman who shies away from a tough job.

She gets paid a small hourly rate to work the haunted house, but that's not what motivates her.

"I just like doing it, and I like all the people," she said. "They're all really nice."

Now, she spends her days with her family, taking cabs to the market, and getting pedicures. And, of course, she also frightens the bejesus out of the local youths come Halloween, too.

"I thank the Lord to be able to do it," she said. "There's a lot of young people that's worse off than I am, so I just enjoy every minute of it."

Once the rush of fear has died down, a lot of the visitors are happy to meet and talk with Mary-Lou, too.

Many of them, even ones who have never met her, call her grandma.

That's what keeps her coming back year after year.

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