The car seat rule is not up for discussion
By Delia Marchetti, Staff writer · · 2 min read
The car seat is in the driveway. It is still in the box.
Carol has been looking at it for twenty minutes. Her daughter-in-law dropped it off on the way to work with a page of instructions and a sentence. "He can't ride with you until it's in."
Carol raised four children. None of them rode in a seat like this. Two of them rode in the back of a station wagon on a mattress. All four are alive and one of them is the father of the boy who cannot ride with her until the seat is in.
She says this to me on the phone. I say nothing useful.
She reads me the first page. There is a diagram of a car that is not her car. There is a warning in a box about something called a top tether. She does not know what a top tether is. I do not know what a top tether is. We are two women in our sixties on the phone on a Sunday not knowing what a top tether is, and somewhere a four-year-old is waiting to go to the zoo.
The instructions are eleven pages. There is a strap that goes through the back of the seat and a strap that does not, and the difference matters, and there is a line on the side of the seat that has to be level with the ground, and the ground in Carol's driveway is not level.
"I could just put him in the regular seat belt," she says.
She could. He is four. Nobody would know.
She would know. That is the problem with being the grandmother. The rules are not yours and the child is not yours and you will follow the rules anyway, because the alternative is a phone call you do not want to have, and because the daughter-in-law is not wrong, and because being right about 1979 does not help anybody in a parking lot in 2025.
Her son, when she called him, was no help. He said his wife handled the seat. He said it like a man describing the weather. Carol said she had handled four seats and a station wagon and had he forgotten the station wagon, and he said no, Ma, and said he had to go.
Carol got it in. It took her an hour and a half and a neighbor's son. The line is level. The boy rode with her on Thursday.
She is still annoyed. She told me so. She said the thing that bothers her is not the seat. It is that nobody asked her how she did it for four kids, and she would have liked to tell them, even though she knows what the answer would be.