My mother-in-law CUT OFF my daughter’s CURLY HAIR to make her “MATCH BETTER”

Tom asked if she remembered all the times Ruth compared the girls’ hair. He asked if she remembered Ruth “called Zoe’s curls unruly and wild while praising Olivia’s straight blonde hair as silk.”

Camila looked at the floor. She said “she thought their mom was just being old-fashioned” but Tom said, “no she was being racist and playing favorites and they’d all ignored it long enough.”

Confronting the Patterns of the Past

The therapist’s office had gentle lighting and toys scattered across a soft rug, the kind of space designed to make children feel safe. The therapist was younger than I expected, maybe early 30s, with a calm way of moving that put Zoe at ease within minutes.

She played with Zoe using dolls and drawing while asking careful questions about family and feelings. After 30 minutes, she asked to speak with Tom and me privately while Zoe played in the waiting room with a supervised aide.

The therapist was gentle but direct. She explained “that the hair cutting combined with years of different treatment had already affected Zoe’s self-image at just 2 years old.”

She said Zoe showed signs of understanding that she was less favored than her cousins. She said she’d internalized the message that something about her wasn’t good enough.

The therapist recommended weekly sessions and absolutely no contact with Ruth until Zoe was much older and could process the rejection properly with professional support. She said “forcing contact now would only reinforce Zoe’s belief that she had to accept being treated as less than.”

I posted about the therapy recommendation that night without naming the professional or giving details that could identify her. I explained that my toddler was now in therapy because her grandmother’s favoritism had damaged her sense of self-worth before she was even old enough for preschool.

The account had grown to over a thousand followers. My post got picked up by three different local parenting groups who shared it with warnings about grandparent favoritism.

Comments flooded in from people sharing their own therapy stories. These were adults who were still working through childhood rejection from grandparents who played favorites.

Someone started a thread listing signs of favoritism to watch for. Someone else created a resource document with therapist recommendations and articles about protecting children from toxic family members.

Ruth’s Facebook went dark within 48 hours of my first post. Her friends started commenting on her older posts asking about the allegations, wondering if the stories about her cutting a granddaughter’s hair were true.

Ruth deleted every comment and then deleted her entire social media presence. She removed years of photos and posts in one sweep.

Tom’s brother Hank called on the third day. He said “their mother was devastated and humiliated” and asked, “Couldn’t we please take down the posts and handle this privately like adults?”

I told Hank “that Ruth had years to handle this privately while she showered his daughter with love and treated mine like an inconvenience and now everyone got to see exactly what kind of grandmother she really was.”

Hank hung up on me, but I noticed he didn’t actually defend his mother’s behavior. The silence on his end before the click said more than any argument could have.