She Tried to Mitigate This Disaster
My son is 4.5 weeks old. Immediate problems with my mother-in-law started mid-pregnancy. My wife and I had been trying to have kids for a while (two miscarriages last year). Needless to say, this pregnancy had been planned out from the start. Part of the plans were of course the delivery itself. My wife did not want anyone but me and her friend/photographer in there during the delivery. The rest of the family would be given updates and allowed in after we had spent some bonding time with our son. It’s worth pointing out that the last part is hospital policy regardless, which we didn’t know at the time.
We didn’t want people waiting in the lobby because I was not going to be out there dealing with their emotions and needs during the whole ordeal. My singular concern was to be there with my wife and child. We had been telling friends and family this from an early stage of the pregnancy. Every single person we told had all unanimously said, “Okay, no problem.” Because why should it be a problem? Everybody, that is, except my mother-in-law. She would always say, “No, I’m going to be there, you can’t keep me away.”
We would resist, but as time went on it started becoming more and more heated. Mind you, this woman has a lifelong history of being controlling towards her children, so this isn’t new territory. The week my wife was due, it ramped up a notch. It all turned into actual arguments and all-out hostility. She began calling me a “sperm donor,” claiming this was all my attempt to shut her out, etc. We started getting screenshots of messages from family members where she had started a complete smear campaign against me and was trying to turn her entire family against me.
Even more confusingly, she had tried that with my own mother. So my wife ends up giving birth late at night with a surprise c-section, while our son ends up in the NICU for a couple of hours. My wife was out of it, and I was trying to bounce between her and our son, all the while my mother-in-law was apparently going berserk because we weren’t dealing with her needs. Next thing we know, she shows up at the hospital in the middle of the night causing a scene. Security rightly stopped her at the entrance and didn’t allow her up. My son and I had finally been reunited with my wife about 20 minutes prior to this. The hospital, as mentioned, doesn’t even allow calm rational visitors within this time.
Let alone lunatics in the middle of the night ranting and raving in the ER lobby. So of course this was, once again, my fault. I set up the hospital regulations. Silly me. It’s important to note that my wife had tried at every step to mitigate this disaster. Even so much as trying to talk her mother down WHILE SHE WAS IN LABOR, telling her to come around 8:00 in the morning so that she can bring her boyfriend and son. Not “Come back when I’ve finally rested from being in labor all night.” Just “come at a reasonable time with the rest of your family.”
So the attacks continued. We had a local private detective come in and we tried to get a restraining order, but the hospital is in a different county than where we live. They suggested contacting the PD where we live when we leave the hospital. You bet I called them within the hour of being home, but that department said they couldn’t do anything unless she actually broke the law. But we’ve at least begun building a paper trail. One incident with hospital security, once with first PD, one with our local PD. Since then, we have had further attacks on our character, which my wife has fought back on as much as possible. All of these decisions were hers from the beginning and she has tried to correct my mother-in-law’s version wherever possible, yet the mother-in-law still uses it as an easy attack against me.
She has still not seen my son, and is currently not welcome around him. She will go behind bars if she so much as tries to come around my son at this stage. There have been enough written notices and contacts with law enforcement to give us the paper trail. After witnessing her mistreat her children for years, I will never let her around my child so long as she continues to act this way. She will certainly never watch my child. There will be no unsupervised visits. I have zero regrets that she has never met her grandson. He has had so much quality time with his extended family. Everybody else has been so happy to meet him, and he is a very happy baby. He is missing nothing. Story credit: Reddit / WillCodeForFalafel