Agreed, My mom was a crappy parent but a super grandparent. Of course, she loves my husband and my siblings spouses but if she didn’t she’d never let the kids know. Her grandkids are all grown or near grown now, but the grand nieces and nephews love her and she spoils them rotten.
It’s late and I haven’t finished reading through the thread, but in case no one else has said it:
Putting a child in the middle of a toxic relationship will cause a child to grow up believing that such toxic relationships are normal. Speaking from personal experience, once this kid is an adult on her own, it will take years to undo all that and figure out what a normal, healthy relationship looks like from the inside. It’s damn hard to figure out what it should look like or how to BE in one, when you have absolutely no experience of accurate benchmarks to measure against.
Children model behaviors that they see, and adults model the relationships they grew up with. They even do so in spite of themselves.
Also, not having a relationship with a toxic person is no tragedy. It’s quite healthy.
I’m not seeing where it benefits the OP’s family life to teach the child “no, Mommy isn’t REALLY a FULL family member, we exclude her from family gatherings, Grandma is more important than Mommy is and it’s fine to shut Mommy out and devalue her as a family member because Grandma can’t act like a grownup”.
I know the OP is long gone, but I think it was a very passive aggressive way to ask the question, and that sort of approach probably causes all sorts of problems in his life. The truth is, he wants his daughter and his mother to have a relationship, but rather than have a discussion about that, he wants to phrase it in terms of “rights” so that he can feel like he has the moral high ground and is only speaking out in terms of truth and justice.
This matters because the reason why he wants this makes a difference. Is it “I want my mother and daughter to have a relationships because, despite her issues with my wife, my mom’s a great person towards those she thinks of as “hers” and I think every child should have as many different adults loving and supporting them as is possible. I don’t want to deny my daughter the positive good that would come from this relationship” or is it “I want to continue to have a relationship with my mother, but if I don’t let her see my daughter, she’s going to give me crap about it all the time, and blame my wife even more, and I don’t want to put up with that.” I could be persuaded by the first argument, but all this talk about “rights” makes me think it’s really more the second.
Also, I don’t agree with the idea that “forbidden fruit” Grandma would be a threat later. A grandmother you’ve never seen is just some old lady. The real danger is a grandmother who never says anything overtly critical, but takes a deep breathe and Doesn’t Say Anything whenever your mom comes up, or who says innocuous things like “Your mom does her best” or “I don’t think your mom really gets us Smiths” or who gives you things that are forbidden at home or lets you do things that are against mom’s rules, which is an implied criticism of those rules. That’s priming the pump for full-on mutual bitch sessions when the little girl is 15 and old enough to know not to repeat these conversations at home.
This. Go to a neutral place, like McDonald’s. Let Gramma hold the baby, make gooey noises, and the very SECOND she says something like, “Oh, I see you have your mother’s shifty eyes,” then you grab the baby from her arms and say, “Bye, Gramma.”
No arguing, no name-calling, no guilt-mastering. Don’t reward Gramma with ANY feedback.
Pack the kid in the carseat and LEAVE.
~VOW