There are some people who cannot be happy for others. You’ve met someone like this before — it sounds like they’re complimenting you but secretly it’s a dig. Those people are the worst, and unfortunately, sometimes they’re your own family. I can practically see one woman on Reddit roll her eyes at her mother-in-law, who thought she was being really slick when she “congratulated” a mutual friend on her recent premature delivery. “This woman can not say a ‘congratulations’ without leaving a backhanded compliment,” she explained on Reddit.
The Original Poster (OP) saw it with her own eyes — her MIL being a complete jerk.
As she explained in her post, their mutual friend had “an extremely difficult birth.”
“I’m talking that it was certain that either she or the baby or both would pass away,” she explained.
Luckily, her friend’s doctors were able to save her, and now both mom and baby are doing fine.
Her friend’s baby was born early and “is very sensitive.”
But still, her friend wanted to celebrate so she posted the baby’s name and date of birth online.
Most people wrote “congratulations” — but OP's MIL is not most people.
“It looks weak and very small. Congratulations, praying for you.”
The OP gasped.
This was not good — far from it.
“So far nobody has said anything but I’m hoping she’ll get called out,” she wrote. “I’ll be refreshing my book of faces periodically lol.”
The comment section was in agreement — this was some pretty unforgivable bad behavior.
"Not only did she say weak and small….she used IT on the post announcing the name….IT," one commenter pointed out. "This wasn't an early pregnancy song, where the gender is unknown…ohhhhh I'd SOOOOO be tearing her a new a–hole if I was the baby's mom, or family member….Good. Lord."
"This is the same generation of people that thought me in preschool 'if you don't have anything nice to say don't say anything at all,' why does this concept seem to elude so many MILs?" someone else wondered.
"Wow, that's not a backhanded compliment, that's a straight up insult. How she could think that's okay is beyond me," a third commenter chimed in.
The OP shared that her MIL later deleted her comment — but that’s most likely because she got her butt handed to her by their friend‘s mother.
The new grandmother told her MIL “that what she commented was incredibly rude and that their friendship of 20 years is over,” OP wrote in an update to her post.
“MIL was crying to Significant Other about this on the phone, saying that she didn’t mean the comment in a harmful manner, and that it was just an observation,” she recalled.
But not all observations need to be said out loud or written for all to see.
The OP’s husband reminded his mother to “respect their boundaries and to be more careful and that was pretty much it.”
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