For some, the relationship with their in-laws is always complicated. When things are good, they're great! But when they're bad, they're pretty much the worst. One woman was feeling this burn from her mother-in-law after she had to undergo a medically necessary hysterectomy that grandma didn't approve of. She blew up her daughter-in-law's business on Facebook, accused her of lying, and said "a lot more hurtful things" — and of course, now is trying to act like nothing happened.
This whole mess started when the Original Poster (OP) and her husband had his mom over for a visit.
A she explained in a post on Am I The A–hole, her MIL was visiting and happened to see a stack of books about fostering that the OP picked up at the library before the global health crisis.
"Oh, you’re becoming foster parents?" her MIL asked her with a "definite frown in her tone."
"Just researching," the OP's husband told her.
"I’d hoped you'd have another baby, a real child," she said.
This got the OP's hackles up. "Several of my siblings became foster parents in the past few years" she wrote online, and she knows all too well that foster kids ARE real kids.
"I admit, I got a bit snippy and said that the state wouldn't go through the trouble of certifying us to be foster parents only to give us cardboard cutouts, they'd let us foster real children," she recalled.
Her MIL was so desperate for the OP to have a "real" child that she even offered to pay for another round of IVF.
But there was a problem. Her MIL had no idea that the OP had a hysterectomy after she gave birth to her daughter 18 months ago.
"It ended up being a necessity after they cut me open," she explained. At the time, the couple chose to tell no one about what happened because "no one lived close by before the birth, it just never came up in conversation and partly because it's no one else's business," she explained.
So after her MIL offered to pay for their IVF, she had to reveal the news.
"Why did you lie to me! I'm never going to be a grandma again!" her MIL told her after learning the truth.
The husband made his mother leave, but she still took to FB to launch an attack.
Within 30 minutes of her prompt exit, her MIL wrote a thinly veiled post about the OP's hysterectomy online.
"No names, but when MIL mentions 'They've only blessed me with one grandchild!' and we're the only couple in the family with a single child it's obvious that she's talking about us," she wrote.
The OP struck back and responded to the post, writing that "the hysterectomy was for health reasons and I'd probably be dead without it."
"Dear Husband and I felt that me being here, alive, and raising Dear Daughter was more important than the good possibility of me popping out another baby and then dying," she wrote online.
Her MIL then accused her of not trying to "save her fertility."
She also blamed her DIL for deciding to "kill your future children and lie to the entire family."
Several family members privately messaged the couple and told them that the OP should have told her MIL about the procedure.
So the mom decided to block her MIL and call it a day.
It's been more than two weeks since the explosive visit, and guess who came crawling back?
In a second post written on the r/JUSTNOMIL subreddit, the OP shared that her MIL was back and worse than ever. She texted the OP like nothing had ever happened, asked her why she couldn't find her on Facebook, and then asked for pictures of her granddaughter.
"I miss seeing sweet girl and her toofy smile! Send me the pictures?" she asked.
The OP is livid. First her MIL puts all of her private medical information on Facebook, then she accused her of 'killing future grandchildren,'" and finally she told the OP that if she was there when the hysterectomy happened that she could have "made us see sense."
"And then ask for pictures like you’ve done nothing wrong?"
Nuh-uh.
The OP's husband is furious.
He wants to wait a few days before he calmly tears his mom to shreds, but it goes without saying that the OP will not be sending her photos.
Other people were not having her MIL temper tantrum.
"She doesn't deserve to be in your child's life and it's ridiculous that she's throwing a fit about something that was necessary to your health," one commenter wrote.
"WOW this woman is incredibly selfish and entitled," someone else agreed. "No way in the world are you the [expletive] and I can't see any reason at all that you should have to speak to her again unless you really want to (though I don't think I ever would)."
We think the OP doesn't owe her MIL anything, especially after she went public with their dirty laundry. But perhaps one commenter wrote it best: "I say stand firm in No Contact. She made her bed she can lie in it. Period."
