Mom Outraged To Learn Grandma Tricked Grandson Into Calling Her ‘Mom’ While He Temporarily Lived With Her

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Life can get pretty complicated and sometimes doesn't really take our plans into consideration. So when a mom on Reddit fell ill, she had her mother step in to help care for her son while she got back on her feet. It wasn't until she was finally ready to get her son back that she learned her own mother crossed a line.

The mom wouldn't get into specifics but said her son lived with her mother for a year due to "health reasons."

"My mother agreed to take care of him while I was away," she clarified. "I facetimed with him whenever I could. Fast forward to last month, I come to my mother's house to pick up my son. He's happy to see me and me and my mother are talking while he's playing with his dinosaurs. He suddenly looks up at my mother and says 'Mommy, I'm thirsty.'

"I was obviously confused, and asked my mother if she heard him call her mom," the mom continued. "She laughed nervously and said that he had been calling her that for awhile. She basically explained that while I was away she told him that she was his mom and to call her that."

The mom immediately told grandmom she was uncomfortable with her new title, but it escalated from there.

"I told her he should know that she's his grandmother, not his mom. She got upset and told me that he needed a mother figure while I was gone, and she was just trying to fill that role for him," she wrote.

"She said something along the lines of 'I've been his mother for a year now, and you can't change it.' We went back and forth until it got to the point where we started raising our voices. She spat out some insults about me being a bad mom for being away for so long and how she should be his mom cause he doesn't need a mom like me," her post continued.

Consequently, she decided to lay down some pretty strict ground rules.

"I simply told her that she isn't going to be seeing him anymore because I'm not comfortable with him calling her mom," she stated. "We gathered his stuff and left after that. She blew up my phone for days, talked some mess to family members, anything she could to make me look/feel bad. But I refused to forgive her, especially after all that stuff she said." 

Now, she wants to know if she's wrong for banning her mother from seeing the grandson.

Redditors revealed they though the whole situation was just an utter disaster.

"Grandma could've easily clarified to your son what her relationship is and being a 'mother figure' doesn't have to mean that she has to be called mom," agreed one user. "However, you clearly are aware that you have some issues you had to work out and your mom did something big for agreeing to help raise your kid. You're now cutting him off from an important person in his life for the last year since the two adults can't work out their issues."

Others thought that the situation overall needed professional intervention.

"I hope you are in therapy and your son has someone to talk to too by a professional who deals with children," wrote one concerned reader. "You were away part of his life and now you're taking him away from someone who has been raising him. Whether justified or not, the abandonment issues are there."

"You aren't wrong to feel so strongly about this," wrote another person, who added this:

"You do need to be careful about how you reset your son's relationship with his grandmother. That doesn't mean she should have access to him, it does mean that you don't try to erase her memory. Keep a picture or two of her around to point to and say 'grammy' (or whatever you want him to call you). Ask him what his favorite foods are and how they did things at 'grammy's' house. If he volunteers things on his own, tell him that's how you did things with grammy too."

Though these wounds may take a lot of time to heal, they can if everyone puts the kid's needs first.