As often happens, some click-bait headline sucks me in and I find an interesting ethics topic as a result. This time, the headline was “Woman applauded for demanding parents get noses pierced before they can see granddaughter again.” What???

The story behind that unique description was a woman and her husband took her infant daughter to Mexico to visit her parents. The parents gave the one-year-old girl a pair of earrings for her first birthday, and Mom told them that she would hold on to the gift until her daughter was old enough to have her ears pierced. But when the American couple returned from meeting some friends after leaving the girl in the care of Grandma and Grandpa, they were informed that they “didn’t need to wait [until she was old enough] because they had taken her to get her ears pierced” already.

The couple was furious. The girl’s father said that they could never trust the grandparents alone with their daughter, but his wife announced that she would not take her or any future kids to see her parents in Mexico. The family checked out of their hotel and returned to the States.

Then things got weird. The mother refused to speak to her folks and ignored their calls. When she had cooled off sufficiently to call them, she told them how upset she was that they would presume to get the baby’s ears pierced without her permission “They said that my sister and I both had pierced ears when we were babies and that it did not harm us,” she wrote on Reddit. “I said that we were not going to change our minds. They started getting everyone including my grandmother to call me and say I was being ridiculous.”

The Reddit conversant and her husband finally agreed to visit the grandparents again, but the grandparents had lost their babysitting privileges. And there was a condition for even that level of contact: the grandparents had to get their noses pierced if they ever were to see their grandchild again. “They said that we are being stupid and that they are not going to do that,” the angry mother wrote. ” I said no problem and hung up. We have started blocking anyone who tries to call us and give us shit for denying my parents their RIGHT to see my daughter.”

The majority of the participants in the popular forum, Am I The A**hole, sided with the mother. Well, it is my professional opinion that they are wrong, and that the mother is “the asshole.”

One of the problems with what I am fighting through right now after the sudden death of my wife is that so many things remind me of her, the fact that she’s gone forever, and the yawning canyon her death has left behind. The story tale of the Mexican grandparents reminded me of a similar episode with my parents shortly after we brought my son home from Russia.

When Grant was about one, we had my parents baby-sit him at their condo about a block away while we went to a party. Weeks later, my sister let it slip that they had shown up at her house with our son, and swore my sister to secrecy. On my mother’s insistence, the had driven there, about a 15 minute drive but including a stretch on the highway, without any child seat. They knew we had not authorized them to do any traveling with our baby, and knew that Grace particularly would be furious.

She was. She didn’t confront them or raise the issue, though my sister told them that the jig was up. She just never trusted them to babysit Grant again. They saw him often, both when they came to our home and when we would take him to their condo. But as far as Grace was concerned, she couldn’t trust them to be alone with him. I know that resolution upset my mother, who had frequently placed both me and my sister in the care of her mother. And Mom would occasionally make veiled references to Grace refusal to give them a second chance.

I agreed with Grace. I knew, as Grace had discovered, that my mother, for all her wonderful traits, was incorrigibly sneaky as well as obstinate. She had betrayed our trust, believed (like the Mexican grandparents, that it was no big deal (I think it was a much bigger deal than the ear-piercing) and felt Grace was being cruel. She wasn’t being cruel; she was being responsible.

The Reddit story is a little different, and my analysis is different. The rogue ear-piercing sounds like the result of a cultural disconnect that the daughter should be sensitive to. Unlike the unauthorized car trip, the ear-piercing wasn’t dangerous (you should have seen how my father drove). Deciding that she could not trust her parents alone with her child, the same decision my wife made, is ethically defensible. The nose-piercing demand, even assuming that it is an exaggeration to make a point, is excessive, and if the Redditer is serious about it, the demand is unfair.

The equivalent in our case would have been demanding that my mother car surf with my father behind the wheel.