What she says is: Are my granddaughter’s bangs getting in her eyes? What she means is: Your kid needs a haircut. What she says: Does your daughter need a sweater? What it sounds like: What kind of mother would let her daughter run around like that?

There is no circle of hell quite like the one featuring a passive-aggressive grandmother with opinions about how you parent your children.

For me and my mother, it started with small things – like unnecessarily buttoning up my four-year-old’s shirt on a warm day, after I said that Layla was just fine as she was. But as my daughter has gotten older, my mother has gotten bolder until, all of a sudden, everything I do as a mother can be done better by grandma. She would never just come out and say as much, of course. She just implies it by carefully undermining me at key moments – it’s more polite that way.

The last straw in our passive aggressive battle of mothering skills was over a winter jacket. Layla had one, but my mother kept mentioning this “very warm” jacket she had bought. “Bring it back,” I told my mother. “She already has a winter jacket.” I should have known better.

Weeks later, my mother texted, “I noticed when I picked Layla up she had a very short pink jacket on. I have this VERY WARM coat that I’ll bring over ...” I won’t tell you what my reaction was, exactly, but it wasn’t my finest moment.

When we put so much effort into parenting, the small swipes – even if done with and out of love, and especially when it comes from our own mothers – sting quite a bit. It can feel as if every day that we manage to make sure our children are clothed, fed and bathed is some sort of small miracle, as if it’s unfathomable that our mother’s daughters could have made it so far without doing grievous harm to our own children.

Considering the pressure that parents already have to be “perfect” – mothers especially – that extra knife-twist from, say, your mother, implying that your parenting isn’t up to snuff ... well, it feels particularly hard to bear.

My mother – and many an overbearing grandmother like her – means well, of course, and her helicopter-grandparenting comes from her deep love for both Layla and I. She’s helped me in ways big and small to raise Layla, and I know that there’s no way I could have been as good a mother without her. But I’ve also needed her to accept that I’m more than just her child – I’m also a mother and, even if I mother slightly differently than she did, I’m doing pretty well so far.

Yes, my mother thinks that Layla’s room is “too cold” and her hair is “too long” and the dishes are too piled up the sink and the floor isn’t vacuumed up to her standards. And, yes, she finds some “polite” way to remind me that she thinks all of that and more in the same tone she worried that I’d be “too cold” in a miniskirt as a teenager. But none of that means we don’t love each other, or love Layla a tremendous amount.

What it does mean is that we both have to try a little harder – my mother to see me as an adult and a parent worthy of her respect even when we differ, and me to see her as more as well-meaning, and knowledgeable, than bossy. She’s a grandmother now – who just really, really wants her grandchild to have the world’s warmest coat.