“Bad Nani.”

Ely, my 3-year-old grandson, flung his pudgy little fingers across the back of my leg. Before I could grab his hand, he ran across the room and threw himself into his mother’s arms.

Ely had spit his food onto the floor and thrown his plate across the room. Glaring at my daughter, I‘d willed her to do something to stop his unacceptable behavior. She had calmly knelt down to wipe up the food spewed out across the floor.

“Ely, stop that!” A sharp voice from deep within me yelled. I then became the bad Nani who yanked him off his booster seat, ran across the room with him kicking and screaming in my arms, and placed him roughly on a chair in the corner. “You need some time out. Stay on that chair,” I said harshly.

That’s when my grandson slid off the chair and slapped me across the leg. I now stared at Sarah gently comforting her son. Shaking my head in an attempt to dislodge the truth of what had just taken place, I wrapped my arms tightly around my shoulders and ran up to our upstairs bedroom.

It was the day before Christmas. Our daughter Sarah, with her husband and their two boys, had come to our house for Christmas Eve dinner and to open the mountains of presents under our ornamented tree. The tree stood two stories tall in our vaulted-ceiling living room. It had taken four of us to haul it from its home on snowy Mt. Hagan into our living room. We dubbed it the “best Christmas tree ever.”

My husband Ed and I had recently retired, and our grandsons Ely and his 6-year-old brother Henry were at the center of our lives. They lived only an hour away from us and we spent as much time as possible with them. They were always lively and boisterous with us. But when their parents were present, boisterous turned into unruly and disruptive behaviors. And now, with the added stimuli of Christmas sparkles and treats, the boys were acting out in ways we found completely unacceptable.

Earlier that day when Henry screamed “No! Shut up!” at his father, who had asked him to pick up his toys, Ed pulled me into our bedroom and closed the door behind us. “I can’t tolerate how those kids act when their parents are here,” he said, his face rigid. “They’re nothing like that when they’re with us alone. It has to stop or they need to leave our house.”

“But that’s normal, Ed,” I said. “Kids always act out more when their parents are around.” I was desperately trying to normalize behaviors I knew weren’t normal, at least not in our book. Because I was afraid. I knew my husband was close to violating a rule we had set for ourselves the day Henry, our first grandchild, was born: We would be there to love on our grandchildren, and we would never, ever interfere with their parents’ child-rearing.

“My kids never acted like that,” Ed muttered.

It was true. I knew it wasn’t just a case of faulty memory. Like many Generation X parents, our children’s parenting didn’t look much like ours. We Baby Boomers scoffed if our kids wanted a ride somewhere when their bikes or skateboards could take them there. Sarah and her husband spent practically every day of the week carting their children to soccer, flag football, baseball, guitar, swimming lessons, birthday parties and other events.

Our kids had no choices about what food was put in front of them, and they had to clean their plates at every meal. If they didn’t, they’d hear all about the starving children in Africa. Our grandsons knew that as long as they tasted just three small bites of the food lovingly placed before them, they could dump the rest.

And when our kids acted out in ways we thought were inappropriate, we sent them to their room until they said they were sorry. When our grandsons misbehaved, their parents gently tried to reason with them.

Now I sat at the edge of the bed in our upstairs bedroom, my face in my hands. “I promised myself I would never do that,” I moaned into my hands. “It’s not up to me anymore, no matter what I think.”

“My job is to shut up and just love them.”