After nine months of pregnancy and a “scary” and “complicated” birth experience, a new mom is dealing with a boyfriend who thinks she had it easy because she had an emergency C-section. As if his comments weren’t already offensive enough, the 25-year-old mother has even told her boyfriend that the experience was “traumatic” for her, yet his attitude hasn’t changed. While an insensitive partner is the last thing anyone wants to deal with while recovering from a surgical procedure, the woman has started to worry that she’s simply overreacting. The internet really feels for her.
The mom’s C-section wasn’t planned.
In a post shared on Reddit, the new mom explained that she was not originally planning on having a C-section. But things didn’t go as planned when she welcomed her baby six months ago. While she didn’t go into detail, she said “things got complicated and it was scary.” Luckily, both she and her baby are doing OK now.
Though she faced complications, her boyfriend seems to think she had it easy.
The woman’s boyfriend — who, notably, was never pregnant and did not give birth — keeps making comments that really hurt his girlfriend’s feelings. He has said that his girlfriend “didn’t really give birth” and “took the easy way out” by having a C-section. Apparently, when he makes these comments, he’s joking. However, his girlfriend understandably finds the “jokes” pretty hurtful. “He always says it like a joke, but the more he says it, the more it stings,” she wrote on Reddit.
She has told her boyfriend how she feels about these comments.
When the woman has expressed how she feels, her boyfriend has laughed, called her “sensitive,” and insisted that the comments are actually “not a real insult” because he simply means that she “didn’t have to push.” He has made these kinds of comments in front of other people as well. According to the woman, he voiced this opinion in front of his sister, and she “thankfully shut him down.”
However, the pushback hasn’t seemed to stop him from making offensive comments. “I’ve explained that it was traumatic, it required surgery, and I’m still recovering from it,” the woman wrote. “But he keeps making the same stupid comment.”
After a while, she decided to be firm with him. “I finally told him it really bothers me and if he can’t stop, I’m not going to laugh it off anymore,” she said. But in response, her boyfriend “got annoyed” and accused her of “making a big deal out of nothing.”
She asked if she’s overreacting.
In spite of her hurt feelings, it sounds like the new mom is trying to consider her boyfriend’s perspective. She asked Redditors if she was being “too emotional.” “I’m feeling like I overreacted but I also feel so disrespected,” she concluded. “Am I being too emotional? Is it really ‘just a joke’?”
People sided with her.
An overwhelming majority of Redditors told the new mom that she is not overreacting. “That is not just a joke, that’s very disrespectful and I’m sorry you’re being treated like that by somebody who is supposed to protect you,” one person wrote. “That is certainly not the easy way out!!”
Another person commented: “Keep telling him how much it’s insensitive, ignorant and dismissive to make those comments. As a mother of four that gave birth vaginally, I tip my hat to any woman that had a c-section. I can’t imagine that kind of pain.”
Some called her boyfriend “clueless” and went so far as to call him a “jerk.” “How many times did he push?” one person pointed out. “Or throw up? Or walk around with a bowling bowl strapped to his torso? Or have multiple layers of his skin/muscle/organs cut open? You’re not overreacting – that’s a really crappy thing to do to someone who put in a hell of a lot more work into creating life than he did.”
These stories are based on posts found on Reddit. Reddit is a user-generated social news aggregation, web content rating, and discussion website where registered members submit content to the site and can up- or down-vote the content. The accuracy and authenticity of each story cannot be confirmed by our staff.
