When touring an art museum in Europe, she purchased a gift to mail back to her 8-month-old grandson, Rowan ? a blue stuffed teddy bear with a rather prominent penis and testicles.
?I was shocked,? says Cannon, 35, a Seattle-based multimedia producer for msnbc.com, who promptly shoved the bear back in its box and has dodged the issue since. ?We?re still not exactly sure what her intention was. I feel a little awkward asking at this point.?
From inappropriate gifts to indulgent behavior, ask any group of moms and you?ll be showered with stories of grandparents behaving badly. Whether it?s a small indiscretion like flouting bedtime to more blatant infractions, such as whisking a baby off for an ear piercing ? or even a baptism ? without permission, parents are often left wondering what their own parents were thinking.
Elizabeth Thielke, 43, a Nashville, Tenn., mom of three who blogs about parenthood at busymom.net, remembers the time she and her husband returned late one night to her mother-in-law?s condo after attending a 20th high school reunion, only to find her 2- and 4-year-olds still awake and running around the living room at 3 a.m.
?They all just kind of said, ?Hey? when we walked in, and went about their business like nothing was unusual,? Thielke recalls. ?We just put them to bed and hoped they'd sleep in the next day. Not much you could say to a free babysitter.?
Often, these intergenerational power struggles revolve around a common theme: grandparents either unfamiliar or dismissive of the modern parents? newfangled tangle of safety rules.
Josephine Lindgren, 40, a New Jersey mom of two who contributes to the parenting blog SVmoms.com, sent her parents to pick up her 2-year-old daughter from a friend?s house while she and her husband were stuck in the hospital during a bout of false labor.
Later, Lindgren discovered her daughter had resisted the car seat, so the grandparents let her ride in the backseat on grandma?s lap ?Britney Spears-style.?
?I was flabbergasted,? Lindgren says. ?I said, ?Please never let that happen again.??
Lindgren chalks up the aberration to the direness of the situation, but also a basic generational divide. ?My dad would say, ?You guys would sit in the front seat with no seat belt and me smoking and you are all fine.??
Breast-feeding seems to be an issue especially rife with mother-daughter drama. On the UrbanBaby.com message board, one mom laments how she discovered her parents were sneaking formula into the bottle of her breast-fed infant, convinced the baby was undernourished and that breast milk was ?toxic.? Another grandmother tossed her daughter-in-law?s carefully cultivated three-month supply of pumped breast milk to make room in the freezer for her snacks.
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