How to Deal With a Grandparent You Don’t Like: A Parent’s Practical Perspective
The doorbell rang at 2:03 p.m. last Sunday, and I froze mid-wipe, paper towel crumpled in my hand over a streak of grape juice on the kitchen linoleum. Our 7-year-old Lila hunched a little lower over her unicorn coloring page, and 3-year-old Jake abandoned his block tower to duck behind my leg. It was Marnie, my husband’s mom, the grandmother I’ve never managed to like, no matter how hard I tried.
I pulled the door open, and got the usual whiff of lemon perfume and lemon furniture polish, the scent that always means a stretch of small, sharp comments I’ll rehash in my head for three days after. “Oh, you’re still in sweatpants,” she said by way of hello, stepping past me with a foil-wrapped pie in her hands. “I thought you’d be dressed for company. And is that Bluey I hear? Still letting the television babysit the kids, I see.” She set the pie on the counter, right next to the gluten-free banana bread I’d baked that morning for Lila’s eczema. “Got the extra-sugary apple kind,” she said, loud enough for Lila to hear. “Your mom’s healthy stuff always tastes like cardboard, doesn’t it?”
Five years ago, I would have forced a laugh, then spent 20 minutes over-explaining myself: the AAP’s screen time guidelines, Lila’s dermatologist-recommended gluten trial, the three hours I’d spent cleaning that morning, the sweatpants being the only clean thing that fit. I would have prodded the kids to give Nana a hug even when they shrank back, smiled through every dig, then cried in the bathroom after she left while my husband loaded the dishwasher.
I tried every common approach back when I thought the goal was to make myself like her, or make her like me. I baked her favorite oatmeal raisin cookies for every visit. I bit my tongue until my jaw ached. Once, after she undermined me about a third popsicle and called me “grumpy” right in front of Lila, I blew up and told her to leave if she couldn’t respect my rules. That led to six weeks of silence, my husband driving the kids over alone, and Lila asking every night if Nana was mad at her because I was “mean.” That was worse than the comments.
The turning point came a few months later, when I buckled Lila into her car seat after a short visit. “I don’t like when Nana says you’re doing stuff wrong,” she said, picking at a loose thread on her jacket. “Your shoulders get all tight.” I’d thought I was hiding my irritation so well behind fake smiles, but kids don’t miss that stuff. They feel inauthentic tension faster than they can spot a hidden lollipop in your purse.
That’s when I stopped trying to fix the relationship, and started managing the situation instead. No big dramatic announcement, no long text listing grievances, just small, quiet changes that took the pressure off everyone, no fight required.
First, I cut visit length and moved them out of my house. We used to do four-hour Sunday dinners around our dining table every month, long stretches of quiet lulls where she’d run out of small talk and start digging for criticisms of my cooking, my part-time work schedule, the kids’ messy bedrooms. Now we do 90-minute visits, either at the neighborhood park or a bakery near her house, scheduled right after naptime so no one’s overtired. I text her the date a week in advance: “We can do 1:30 at Maple Park on the 12th, does that work for you?” No over-explaining, no apologizing. When time’s up, I wipe cookie crumbs off Jake’s shirt and say, “Alright, we’ve got to get home for dinner prep, it was good to see you.” She huffed the first time, but now she just packs her purse and walks us to the car.
I also stopped forcing the kids to be physically affectionate, even to her. Our pediatrician mentioned at a well visit that kids get to decide who touches their body, even relatives, and it clicked I’d been throwing that basic rule out just to avoid awkwardness. Now when Marnie opens her arms and asks for a hug, I step back and say, “They take a minute to warm up these days. It’s up to them.” If Lila wants to run over, she does. If Jake wants to hide behind my leg, that’s fine too. The first time, Marnie huffed that she’s their grandmother, and I said calmly, “I know. We’re teaching them they get to choose who hugs them, to keep them safe. That’s all.” She never pushed it again.
Most days, I don’t engage with small digs at all. I don’t defend my sweatpants, 20 minutes of Bluey, or pre-lunch goldfish crackers. A neutral “It’s been a busy week, this works for us” and a quick subject change is enough. I only push back on comments that hurt the kids, like the time she said Lila would “get chubby” if she kept eating cookies. I corrected her right there: “We don’t talk about food or bodies that way in our family. Cookies are fine sometimes.” After she left, when Lila asked if Nana was right that cookies are bad, I told her simply: “Nana grew up with different rules than we do. She sees things differently, and that’s okay. Our rules are the ones we follow at home.”
I still feel quiet guilt sometimes, from growing up hearing that blood is thicker than water, that grandmothers are supposed to be warm, cookie-baking safe spaces, and disliking yours makes you selfish. But Marnie’s not a villain. She’s a 67-year-old woman raised by a critical mother who thinks pointing out “mistakes” is how you show you care. That doesn’t excuse her comments, but it means they’re not actually about me. I don’t have to absorb them, and I don’t have to force a close relationship to be a good parent. If she ever crossed a hard line—yelled at the kids, said truly cruel things, ignored our basic safety rules—we’d pause visits entirely, no guilt. But this, the small annoying comments and awkward small talk? That’s manageable, on our terms.
Last Sunday, after we walked back from the park, Lila ran up to Marnie unprompted before she got in her car and handed her the unicorn coloring page she’d worked on all morning. Marnie teared up, pulled a cherry lollipop (full-sugar, artificial dye, the kind I never buy) out of her purse and handed it over. I didn’t say a word about the dye. Lila ate it sticky-fingered on the walk home.
I still don’t like Marnie. I don’t look forward to visits, and I still usually vent to my husband for five minutes in the car after if she catches me on a bad day. We’re never going to be best friends baking pies together, and that’s fine. The kids don’t tense up when the doorbell rings anymore. They’re already learning that you can be polite to someone, even care about them in your own quiet way, without wanting to spend all day with them, and that you don’t have to pretend to like every part of every person in your family. That’s enough, for now.
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