I love my mom, but she can be self-centered and has boundary issues. I’m pregnant with my first, her first grandchild, and she doesn’t want to play by my husband’s and my rules. We’ve already had several disagreements about parenting things, and the baby isn’t even here. It’s not like we’re asking for anything unreasonable- we just want to follow modern safety guidelines, like not using drop-side cribs, putting the baby to sleep on its back, no blankets in the crib, using a rear-facing car seat, etc. My mom thinks anything different from what she did is over the top and unreasonable and she already says that she’s going to do things her way and when we’re not around we won’t know anyways.

We’re also having a few other issues that stem from the same self-centeredness. First, she insists on being called “grandma.” Not just “Grandma K” or something like that, but the one and only “grandma.” My husband and I moved to the area where my family lives, across the country from his parents. This means they’re going to be less involved in the baby’s life and miss all sorts of milestones and events, and not through any choice of their own. Additionally, they are the only grandparents who are still together. I already told them that they could be grandma and grandpa, because it seemed like the least we could do. My mom threw a fit about it because she doesn’t want my MIL to be “grandma.” We’ve suggested all sorts of alternatives for my mom, but she insists that she hates them all and that she will teach the baby to call her grandma no matter what. Not only that, she insists that her boyfriend of a few years be called “grandpa.”

The second issue is Facebook. My husband and I don’t post much- just a few times a month probably. My mom posts a lot. She has posted EVERY baby thing before we had a chance. When we told her we were pregnant, she went and posted it on Facebook right away, even though we asked her not to, so that a lot of people (like step parents and siblings) who we wanted to tell ourselves found out from her post. When we found out the gender, she did the exact same thing, so that when we tried to tell people they all knew already. We’ve told her that when the baby is born, if she posts on Facebook before us we won’t let her visit the baby in the hospital. She cried. I tried to explain to her that it’s not that hard- all she has to do is not post until my husband or I post. Instead of just agreeing, she insisted that she’s going to see the baby in the hospital whether she posts first or not.

Am I being unreasonable? It’s not that the Facebook thing is THAT big of a deal to me, it’s that I don’t want to set a precedent where we, as the parents, give guidelines that she feel free to completely ignore without any consequences. Also, it’s not like she’s already posted without knowing our wishes and we’re now punishing her for it- we’re telling her months in advance what the consequence would be. I’m worried that she’s going to ignore our request and post immediately, and then cry and whine her way into the hospital room, then spend the rest of our child’s life ignoring our directions (even when it comes to things that are important to us, like safety) because she knows she can get away with it.