Another day, another tale of a grandma who’s defied instructions and seized the chance to mess sh*t up the moment she’s alone with her grandchild.
And, of course, she has absolutely no regrets, despite the chaos she’s caused.
“She has given my child her first haircut”
A poor mom learned the risks the hard way recently, when she left her very own mother with her daughter, and was savagely betrayed.
“Trying to figure out how to handle this without screaming,” she begins her post seeking advice.
“My mom watches my toddler (20 months) for a few days at a time, twice per month. She stays with us because she lives a few hours away.”
“So far it’s been mostly ok. Just hard having a house guest, and she tends to help ‘too much’ (putting things away in the wrong place, etc).”
This sounds typical, if somewhat annoying.
But one day, the mom returns from work to discover grandma has finally gone too far.
“What. The. #@%$,” she writes.
“I come home and she had given my daughter her first haircut.”
“No discussion, no permission. It looks fine, and we might have said yes if she asked, and my husband and I had talked about it.”
“Now instead of a cute milestone I am just PISSED beyond belief.”
After discussing things with her husband, the mom concludes:
“One: she gave my daughter [a fringe], but I wanted it to grow out. It was so close to behind the ear, and now we are faced with many more months of hair in her eyes.”
“And two – this has us questioning her decision making skills, and what else she might do without asking.”
“Acting as if your child is hers”
The comments section was full of empathetic readers.
“As a parent herself she knows how important this is. She is acting as if your child is her child and she can do what she wants.”
“Glad that it looks Ok and agree that it will grow back but that is not the point. She had no right she needs to understand her role. I too would be absolutely pissed.”
This mom agreed, adding, “If she really was well meaning she wouldn’t have waited until she was alone with the child to do the haircut.”
Then a grandmother offered her take on what went down: “I have wanted to trim my granddaughters’ hair for a long long time, especially the younger one, her hair is all different lengths and she could look so much cuter.”
“But no matter how tempted I am I just kind of know it’s not my place. We joke about it and I say I just don’t know how much longer I can take it. But she just laughs and changes the subject, which is my clue to back off.”
“It’s not up to me. Not without permission.”
“For free childcare, I would let it go”
There were some commenters who were pragmatic about the incident.
“For someone offering free child care that takes her hours away from home, for days at a time, I would let it go,” one wrote.
This reader agreed, adding, “It’s not great that she didn’t ask, but I doubt she was being malicious and it honestly doesn’t matter that much for two reasons: kiddos first haircut experience in a salon chair is the actual milestone, and chances are in 30 years you won’t even remember.”
The mom eventually responded to the comments: “I vented here so I could try to be more reasonable in person… We had a conversation about boundaries and the deeper issue beyond just the hair. We’ll see how things go forward.”
Yes. Time will tell.
