Extra help when a new baby arrives is generally welcomed.
But extra criticism? Not so much.
A new mom turned to the “Am I The A**hole” (AITA) subReddit for feedback after a clash with her mother-in-law.
Possible-Study2746 asked:
“AITA for telling my mother-in-law (MIL) off for her comment regarding my 5-day-old?”
The original poster (OP) explained:
“My husband’s mom called to ask how the baby was doing, and he told her that she was good and was currently taking a nap on him. She was extremely supportive during the entire pregnancy and was even there for the birth, so her calls were welcomed.”
“She responded by saying that it’s not good to let her sleep on us. An annoying comment, but whatever.”
“My husband tells her that there’s nothing wrong with it, and we love letting her sleep on us. Then she proceeded to say, ‘Don’t build bad habits with my baby. ‘”
“That one got to me. Ignoring the ‘my baby’, I said, ‘You can’t build habits with a newborn’.”
“In a sarcastically cheerful tone, she says, ‘Yes, you can, I’ve raised three children!’. I matched her tone and said, ‘Actually, no you can’t! It’s science!’. Then she hung up.”
“After that, she sends me a VERY long message about how she has never been able to tell how I feel about her and how she hopes one day we can be close, which was news to me because I felt closer with her than any of my own family.”
“She also said she feels like I don’t want to hear anything she has to say when it comes to the baby, and she wants to be able to give advice and make suggestions.”
“This was referencing the phone call as well as a couple other things she had suggested previously. I had told her we wouldn’t be doing those things because we already looked into it and decided to do something else.”
“I responded by telling her I had no idea where all this was coming from, as I felt we already had a close relationship, and I apologized if I ever acted in a way to make her think differently.”
“I also said that while I didn’t want to invalidate her experience as a mother, I didn’t really want advice unless I asked for it. I said I’m glad that what she did worked for her, but all babies are different, and I’m constantly doing research and making decisions based on that.”
“I finished off by saying that if I want advice, I will absolutely come to her, and I want her to be a HUGE part of our daughter’s life.”
She then said that invalidating her experience as a mother was exactly what I was doing, and she was sad that I was being so closed off.”
“Our relationship has been rocky ever since, and sometimes I wonder if I should have just kept my mouth shut and just smiled and nodded instead.”
“So, AITA?”
The OP summed up their situation.
“Rebutting what my MIL said instead of just letting it go. It probably wasn’t a big deal, and maybe I shouldn’t have dismissed her advice so quickly.”
Redditors weighed in by declaring:
- NTA – Not The A**hole
- YTA – You’re The A**hole
- NAH – No A**holes Here
- ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
Redditors decided the OP was not the a**hole (NTA).
“NTA. Here’s what I told my own MIL: ‘It must have been so hard to be a new parent when the only options were advice from others or going to the library and hoping for good information. Then it’s finally your turn to be the advice giver, and the internet takes it away. But I have the absolute privilege to have 30 more years of research and easy access to all of it whenever I need. Nobody is saying you were a bad parent, and you absolutely did the best with what you had. I will also be doing the best with what I have, and I’m so privileged for the additional research and accessible knowledge. I’m happy to ask whenever I have questions and tips; potty training comes to mind. But what I need most right now is a non-judgmental listening ear.” ~ Elemental_surprise
“Beware that it’s not easy to make the switch from parent to grandparent. As a parent, you’re the one in control. As a grandparent, you’re mostly an observer.”
“Probably, when they were a parent, they felt like they didn’t know what they were doing. Now here is another young child and this time they DO know what to do, they already raised three kids after all!”
“Now they have experience, but it isn’t wanted. They’re told their information is outdated, which can feel like an attack on their parenting. They might remember how they struggled as a new parent and want to help their child so they don’t feel like that, especially when they see (or imagine) their kid struggling.”
“I’m not saying you’re wrong. You’re right and NTA. But it might help to approach it with some empathy.” ~ Quadrantje
“My mom was the MASTER of this switch. She was constantly asking me what I needed, not what she thought I should do.”
“Supportive without overstepping.”
“Does she make weird mistakes? Of course, we all do. But I never felt that I had to defend myself.”
“Same thing with my mother-in-law. She would say, ‘You don’t have to do this, but this helped me’— love both of them so much.” ~ SunkenSaltySiren
“NTA- you had me at her saying ‘my baby’… I’m a gen X mom, have recently obtained some grandkids… the audacity…”
“When the parents want advice they ask, when they don’t, I STFU. I was not a perfect parent, they won’t be either, but they will do their best, and short of something truly harmful like abuse, how they choose to raise their child is just something I get to watch from the sidelines.”
“Grandkids are not a ‘redo’. They are a gift that we get for surviving parenting (as our granddogs and grandcats).” ~ Senior_Parking6305
The OP provided an update:
“I have one child—she’s 11 months old now. The posts from today and yesterday are about stuff from the past. The reason I’m posting now is because this stuff has come up again, and it has resulted in us going no contact with my MIL.”
“So to find out if I’m in the wrong for going no contact with her, I’m seeing if I was in the wrong for the things that led up to it. She has a tendency to blow things out of proportion when we tell her she’s out of line in any way.”
“We had a conversation several months after this, where we agreed to try and build back our relationship. We both explained in detail what goes on inside our heads and why we word things/interpret things the way we do.”
“It was productive aside from the fact that she wouldn’t apologize for anything. She said she ‘is who she is’ and had nothing to apologize for.”
“She also said again and again how much she loved me, but I feel like if she really cared about me, then she would feel bad for hurting me. Or maybe she would have never sent such a long message about her feelings when I was a brand new mother.”
“My MIL stayed with us the day we brought my daughter home. One of her suggestions was to give her a pacifier so she’d stop crying.”
“I was trying to breastfeed and explained that I didn’t want to give her a pacifier so early because I didn’t want her to get nipple confusion. That was the end of the conversation, but I found out later that after that, she pulled my husband aside to tell him that I needed to fix how I was acting.”
“Thankfully, he is the one who has dealt with her since this happened. Lots happened since. He is a firm believer that the family he created is his priority, not the family he came from. He has told her she’s out of line time and time again.”
“The lack of respect she has shown for us as people and parents since this happened has led us to very recently cut contact with her. It hurts because my family isn’t very reliable and I wanted my daughter to have a close relationship with at least one set of grandparents, but I feel like it’s what we had to do.”
“She likes to play the victim. She later said she ‘wasn’t allowed to be a grandma’ because we asked her to not feed our daughter without asking us since she was exclusive breastfeeding and hadn’t started solids.”
“She said all she did was let her lick a tomato and we were overreacting. Feeding her or letting her lick something, we felt like it was the principle of asking us first. That turned into her screaming ‘F*CK YOU’ over and over to my husband over the phone.”
OP is looking for a sanity check after the relationship with her mother-in-law deteriorated.
Hopefully she got what she needed.