During Wednesday’s episode of The Today Show , Jenna Bush Hager told her co-host Hoda Kotb about the comical name one of her former boyfriends had for her father which was “Big George.” It’s safe to say that former United States President George W. Bush wasn’t exactly thrilled about the nickname the first time he heard it, according to People.
Choosing how to address a significant other’s parent can already be somewhat of an uncomfortable area, but this is, of course, taken up a notch when your girlfriend’s father is the governor of Texas, as he was at the time.
“I actually had a boyfriend once call my dad ‘Big George,’” Hager recalled, earning a gasp from Kotb and plenty of laughter from the studio.
“He did not!” Kotb responded in shock.
Hager imitated the look of pure shock and horror that her father had at the time and then went on to explain that this way of casually addressing someone who was older than them.
“I think he was the governor at the time. And he was just like, that’s [not] how we were raised, you don’t call — I called even my godmother Regan, who I love, now I call her Regan, but I called her Mrs. Gammon for years,” Hager recalled.
This topic regarding the way young people address elders came up during a conversation during which Kotb and Hager noted that many young people don’t address people older than them as Mr. or Mrs., something that was standard when they were younger.
Hager went on to say that even after she married her husband Henry Hager, she still wasn’t comfortable calling them by their first name until she was a mother herself. Today Hager has three children, 4-year-old Poppy, 6-year-old Mila, and 7-month-old Hal.
During Wednesday’s episode, Hager discussed other ways in which the way she grew up affected the type of parent she would later become. In particular, she recalled the serious conversation her father once had with her regarding alcohol, as The Inquisitr previously reported. He opened up about his own experiences with alcohol, sharing that he felt that there were times in which alcohol had served as an interruption from the things that really mattered in life, such as his hopes, dreams, and priorities.
The former president wanted to be able to parent without distraction, which is why Hager said he eventually cut alcohol out of his life for good.