The first few days after a baby is born are pretty exhausting. You're up with the baby 'round-the-clock, struggling to shower and feed yourself, and don't know whether you're coming or going. Heck, some moms can barely move that first week after physically bringing a new life into the world. So imagine how one newbie mom felt when her mother-in-law insisted she go to a family pool party FIVE DAYS after giving birth. Uh, yeah — that's gonna be a no from me, dawg.
The drama all started when the second-time mom's 3-year-old "informed" her that they were going to a pool party.
Figuring it was just another example of her son's wild imagination, the newly minted mom of two shrugged it off. But, as she recently shared in her viral Reddit post, the pool party turned out to be very real.
Apparently, her husband and his family are notorious last-minute party planners and usually the mom "just rolls with it." But at five days postpartum, no ma'am, that's not happening.
"Anyone who has ever experienced the miracle of childbirth knows that day five, you are still in industrial sized pads, actively bleeding, sore and tired," the poster wrote. "My feet are 3X their size, my breasts hurt, and I don’t even want to talk about how my equator line is doing right now."
YEP — sounds about right.
"So in short, I don’t want to go to a mf’in pool party," she lamented. "But my (damn) husband already told his family we will be there."
The mom's reasons for not going to the party weren't just about her, either -- I mean, hello, she has a 5-day-old newborn at home!
So she did her best to have her husband get them off the hook, but her MIL persisted in convincing both her and her husband to make the trip.
"So here I am," she wrote. "Going to a pool party."
"This is not going to be the hill I die on," she continued. "My day and my hill will come, and I refuse to martyr myself over a pool party today. So I’m going, but any time anyone asks how I am, I’m giving all the details.
"I’m going to let them all know about the mandatory gala party I am throwing the next time any one of them suffers a major medical trauma," she added. "Dear Husband is in the doghouse."
Oof — he certainly is.
Not everyone on Reddit could see her reasoning, though. In fact, many people were seriously confused as to why she caved.
They argued that at five days postpartum, a new mom shouldn't have to do anything that she doesn't want to do — no matter WHAT it is.
"WHAT IN THE WORLD is DH thinking even asking/promising it in the first place?!?!" one person commented. "Presumably (but maybe not if adoption/other circumstances), MIL has given birth in the past? I know women block out a lot of the trauma involved but it would take a lot to think someone should be pressured to take her newborn and sit in the sun at a freaking pool party five days postpartum."
"I don’t understand why you can’t say no?" another commenter added. "You just gave birth, your body needs to heal, you need to rest and bond with your baby. This doesn’t need to be a hill to die on. A simple no will suffice."
Another person put it plainly: "[At] five days postpartum, the most strenuous thing I could do was take a dump," she shared.
And incredibly, the commenters actually managed to change the Original Poster's mind.
It may have taken hundreds of people to point it out to her, but in the end, the mom realized she was being a human doormat.
At first, she tried to compromise.
"I am trying to save my future sanity, honestly," she wrote. "I have told Dear Husband we are spending no more than an hour."
But then she came to her gosh dang senses.
"You know what?" she said. "All of you are right. [Expletive] this noise. I’m not going."
In a later update, she shared that she was staying home and watching TV with her son — which sounds like a WAY better plan than the pool party, if you've got a freshly born baby at home.
"I don’t know why I thought I’d let this one slide," she added. "I have an adult diaper on, I am not going to a damn pool party."
AMEN.
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