As a new mum, those first few days in hospital can be exhausting and stressful. At times it can feel like there are so many medical professionals in your personal space, monitoring whether you’re breastfeeding correctly, how you and your baby are doing, checking in on you even when you don’t need it.
And then there’s the visitors.
One woman had a rather horrific visit from her mother-in-law which didn’t end well.
“Mother-in-law manhandled my nipples”
Posting to Reddit, with the title, “MIL manhandled my nipples,” the woman said in her now-deleted post that she struggled throughout her pregnancy. She said she suffered haemorrhaging from 12 weeks, had preeclampsia, severe perinatal depression and spent most of the pregnancy on bed rest.
“I ended up having an emergency c-section at 37.5 weeks due to my deteriorating physical and mental health, it was all very traumatic and five months postpartum I am still not OK,” she wrote.
The woman’s problems just got worse when her mother-in-law visited just four hours after her baby was born.
“Four hours after my my darling daughter was born, I was doing skin-to-skin. I was exhausted, in pain, and overwhelmed,” she wrote.
“She arrived at the hospital and tried to take my daughter off me four times, telling me I would spoil her by holding her too much.
“Then as I tried to breastfeed she marched over, taking full advantage of my drugged up state, got my nipple between her fingers and started ramming it in my daughter’s mouth.
“I was shocked and froze, she kept squeezing them and forcing it into her mouth.”
“We both said no”
The woman returned the following day and criticised everything from the temperature in the room to the way the baby was dressed. She left, promising to return the following morning with a child she was babysitting.
“I said no, my partner rang her and said no, we thought that would be the end of it,” she continued.
The new mum said she was up all that night trying to breastfeed and settle the baby and they finally fell asleep (still in the hospital) at around 10 am the following morning.
“I was loudly woken by the door opening and a child I didn’t know shouting and throwing seven balloons at me and the bassinet,” she said.
“I was shocked and my daughter started crying. It was mother-in-law and the child we asked her not to bring.”
The mother-in-law rushed to pick up the baby and the woman said no. The mother-in-law abruptly left and followed it up with a call to her son about how his wife was “not hospitable.”
“Not even remotely acceptable”
There was nothing but support for the mum online.
“Sorry this happened to you and congratulations on the little one. Where were the hospital staff?” asked one person.
“I had to stop at ‘spoiling’ and the manhandling,” commented another. “I would have blacklisted her from the room, that’s not even remotely acceptable. I’m sorry you had to go through that.”
Another said, “I think you handled it perfectly. Your mother-in-law is an entitled cankle and deserves much worse treatment than you gave her – you were generous and hospitable given her behaviour.”
Here were also a few too many stories of similar things happening to others.
“I have a friend who this same thing happened to. Her brother caught her mother-in-law trying to breastfeed the baby with a supplement nursing kit from Amazon,” wrote one.
And now five months later, we’re not surprised to hear the older woman is no longer a part of their lives.
“Oh this is just the beginning, but spoiler- five months later and I’m NC (no contact),” the woman wrote in an update.
This article was first published Kidspot and was republished on theAsianparent with permission.