Sometimes parents miss their kids’ firsts — it can hard to be around your kids 24/7, and sometimes it even feels like they wait for you to walk out the door before their first steps, their first word, or their first lost tooth. But some firsts — like your kids’ first haircut — can easily be scheduled and controlled. Unless something goes wrong.
This was exactly the case for one Redditor, who took to the Parents subReddit to see if she’s overreacting or not to her mom’s recent decision to cut her daughter’s hair while babysitting.
“Trying to figure out how to handle this without screaming,” she begins her post. “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 all sounds good and normal. Until the mom came home one day recently.
“But what. The. #@%$,” she continues. “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.”
The parents communicated to mom how upset they were, and while that conversation went well, the mom is having trouble setting aside her anger.
“We already explained how upset we are. She gets it. She’s also here another day. I can hardly look at her. Or my daughter for that matter. I am so mad.”
Her anger has two sources:
“One: she gave my daughter bangs, but I wanted it to grow out,” she goes on. “It was so close to behind the ear, and now we are faced with many more months of hair in her eyes. And 2- this has us questioning her decision making skills, and what else she might do without asking.”
Down in the comments, most responders were enraged right along with the kid’s mother.
“As a parent herself she knows how important this is,” one person commented. “She is acting as if your LO 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.”
“If she really was well meaning she wouldn’t have waited until she was alone with the child to do the haircut,” another added.
A grandmother also weighed in to agree: “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.”
Other Redditors said that understanding intent was important.
“Depends entirely on if this is actually because she’s well meaning and didn’t think it through or because she’s secretly an asshole who wants you to feel bad / wants herself to feel more important. Only you know for sure which one she is.”
Other people were sympathetic to the grandmother.
“For someone offering free child care that takes her hours away from home, for days at a time, I would let it go,” one person wrote.
“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 that outside of photos from the occasion,” another person weighed in.
Responding to the comments, the original poster added, “I vented here so I could try to be more reasonable in person, lol. Very interesting to see comments ranging from ‘no big deal’ to ‘scorched earth’. We had a conversation about boundaries and the deeper issue beyond just the hair. We’ll see how things go forward.”
It sounds like this mom was in the right to get upset and that she is also dealing with moving forward in a responsible way, too. Good job, mom — just sorry you missed that first haircut.
