NEED TO KNOW
- A woman on Reddit says her mother-in-law has been “constantly second-guessing” her since she gave birth to her first child
- In an anonymous post, the woman writes, “She’s always been a little overbearing, but since I had the baby, it’s like she’s taken it to a whole new level”
- Now, the woman wants to know if she’s taken it too far by “snapping” at her mother-in-law and refusing to play “games”
A woman who recently gave birth to her first child says her mother-in-law is “testing” her skills as a parent — and she’s had enough.
In a post shared on Reddit, the woman writes, “Ever since my baby was born, my MIL has been constantly second-guessing me. At first, it was little comments — ‘Oh, you do it like that? Huh.’ But lately, it’s like she’s trying to catch me messing up.”
The woman explains that her relationship with her mother-in-law has historically been “polite but not exactly close.”
“She’s always been a little overbearing, but since I had the baby, it’s like she’s taken it to a whole new level,” the woman adds in her post. “She suddenly acts like she’s the expert on parenting and I’m just some clueless rookie.”
The woman adds that her husband is her mother-in-law’s only son, writing, “I honestly think she still sees him as her little boy rather than, you know, an adult with his own family.”
“She’s always been a bit opinionated, but now it feels like she’s going out of her way to prove she knows better than me,” she continues.
But now, the mother-in-law seems to be creating “weird little tests.”
“She’ll tell me to put socks on the baby, and the second I do, she’ll go, ‘Oh, now she’s too hot.’ Or she’ll say I should let her cry for a bit, and the moment I do, she’s like, ‘A good mother would know when to step in.’ No matter what I do, she finds a way to make it wrong. It’s just constant little digs, like she’s waiting for me to fail at something so she can make a comment,” she writes.
The “final straw,” she recounts, came when the woman’s baby “was fussy,” and the mother-in-law handed her over, adding, “Let’s see if she even stops for you.”
“Like she was waiting for me to fail. I was already exhausted, and that was just too much. It felt like she wasn’t even trying to hide it at that point,” she writes.
She continues: “I snapped and told her, ‘I’m not playing this game with you.’ Now she’s acting like I was rude for no reason, and told my husband I need to apologize. He thinks I should just let it go, but I’m tired of her treating me like I have to prove myself as a mother. It’s exhausting. I don’t know how much more of this I can take.”
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Many fellow Reddit users have recommended that the woman “limit the number of visits” with the mother-in-law.
Others have waded in to say they’ve been in similar situations with their own in-laws, with one woman writing, “I told everyone from that generation I didn’t need their advice, as guidelines for baby care surprisingly changed a lot. So we raise our kid according to current knowledge, which is different from knowledge 30 years ago.”
The commenter continued: “It is very clear and sounds smart, you don’t need to further elaborate why their advice is wrong, you can always say, ‘Oh, yeah, the insight on that changed,’ and it doesn’t cause fights while baby is present.”
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