Ex’s Mother Claimed Grandma Rights on Facebook — Then the Mom Said She’d Call Police
A mother said she had to publicly correct her former mother-in-law after the woman started claiming the mother’s new baby as her grandson, stealing photos from Facebook, and saying she was being denied “grandparents rights.”
The woman shared the situation on Reddit, explaining that she and her ex-husband divorced eight years earlier. They share a 10-year-old daughter, but their marriage ended after he started drinking and refused to work. According to the poster, her former mother-in-law was a major part of the problem because she enabled him and blamed the poster whenever she tried to get him help.
Since the divorce, the ex-husband had continued living with his mother. The poster said he had not been able to keep a steady job and was working part-time at an ice cream shop, while his mother gave him an allowance, gas money, and paid his bills.
The poster eventually remarried and had a baby boy with her new husband.
That baby had nothing to do with her ex-husband or her former mother-in-law.
But at a custody exchange for the 10-year-old daughter, the former mother-in-law asked the poster to send the infant son along too. The poster thought she was joking at first. She was not.
According to the poster, the former mother-in-law insisted that because the baby was the daughter’s sibling, the ex’s family had grandparents rights. The poster told her plainly that her current husband was the baby’s father, so the former mother-in-law was not the baby’s grandmother.
The older woman did not accept that.
She insisted that she and her son had rights.
The situation escalated online. The poster said she had deactivated the old Facebook account she used when she was married and connected to her ex’s family. She usually avoided social media. But her own mother had been posting baby photos on Facebook, and the former mother-in-law apparently began taking photos from the mother’s public account and reposting them.
The former mother-in-law was not only sharing the photos. According to the poster, she was telling people the baby was her grandson and that the poster was denying her grandparents rights.
That pushed the mother to log back into her old Facebook account.
She went to the former mother-in-law’s page and corrected the story publicly. She wrote that her son was not the older woman’s grandchild, that he belonged to her and her current husband, and that the ex’s family had no rights to him. She also said she did not want her former mother-in-law or ex-husband involved in the baby’s life because they were toxic, and she warned that she would contact police if the woman kept asking for the baby.
The woman shared the situation in a Reddit post titled “AITA for saying you’re not the grandma?”: https://www.reddit.com/r/AmItheAsshole/comments/tsc4ed/aita_for_saying_youre_not_the_grandma/
Her ex-husband thought she had handled it wrong. He believed she should not have called out his mother on her own Facebook page in front of other people.
But the poster saw it differently. The former mother-in-law had made public claims about a baby she had no relationship to. She had taken photos without permission, shared them, and framed herself as a wronged grandparent. From the poster’s side, correcting the story publicly was necessary because the misinformation was public too.
The issue was not whether a child can have close relationships with people who are not biologically related. Many families have beloved grandparents, step-grandparents, honorary grandparents, and chosen relatives. But those relationships are built through love, safety, trust, and consent.
That was not the situation here.
The former mother-in-law was tied to the poster’s past marriage, not her new baby. She already had a relationship with the poster’s older daughter because she was connected to the ex-husband. But that did not automatically give her access to the baby born in the poster’s new marriage.
The baby was not a bridge between households. He was not part of the custody arrangement. He was not a package deal with his older sister.
The photo issue made the situation more serious. The former mother-in-law was taking baby pictures from the poster’s mother’s public account and using them to support a false story online. That left the poster trying to protect her baby’s image, correct the false claims, and draw a firm line before the situation escalated further.
The poster later commented that she did not think her ex-husband shared the same delusion, and she did not think her former mother-in-law was necessarily dangerous. She believed the woman liked the attention and enjoyed being the victim.
Even so, the behavior clearly crossed a boundary.
For the mother, the answer was simple: her ex’s mother could be part of her daughter’s life through the ex-husband’s side, but she was not entitled to the new baby. And if she kept pushing, the poster was prepared to involve authorities.
What commenters said
Commenters overwhelmingly sided with the mother and said she was not wrong for correcting the former mother-in-law publicly.
Many said the former mother-in-law created the public problem by posting photos and making public claims first. If she did not want to be corrected in front of people, commenters argued, she should not have spread the false story online.
Several commenters focused on the baby photos. They urged the poster to report the pictures to Facebook and have her mother change her privacy settings so the former mother-in-law could not keep taking images from a public account.
Others said the “grandparents rights” claim was not realistic in the way the former mother-in-law was using it. Commenters pointed out that the baby was not her biological or legal grandchild, and the child’s actual father was the poster’s current husband.
A number of people told the poster to document everything. They suggested screenshots, saved posts, and written records in case the former mother-in-law continued making claims, harassing her, or trying to involve authorities later.
Some commenters also warned her to make sure future daycare, school, or childcare providers knew who was allowed to pick up the baby and who was not.
The strongest advice was to treat the behavior seriously before it grew. The former mother-in-law could not claim a grandmother role by posting photos and telling people she had rights. If she wanted drama online, commenters said, the poster was allowed to correct the record online too.
