TLDR; MIL dropped my baby on his head at 6w old, tried to lie to me about it, became angry and raised her voice at me when she was asked to leave, and then gave me the cold shoulder for six weeks before she finally owned up to her mistake and apologized. I still feel deeply traumatized by this and can’t move past it. She keeps calling and texting me asking to come spend time with the baby, but I feel physically repulsed by her and don’t want her anywhere near us right now. Even the sight of her name on my phone sends into a panic, and I don’t know what to do.
I apologize in advance as this post will be long—but I feel like I need to write this all out so I can process everything that’s happened.
My MIL is well-meaning and very generous, but she is a boundary-pusher. I’ve always known this about her, but it never l posed much of an issue—prior to having a baby, at least. When I got pregnant, she became overbearing, and I feared that she would be a difficult IL. Unfortunately, I could have never anticipated just how bad things would get.
When I was still pregnant and brought up the topic of daycare/nannies, she shut me down immediately and informed us that SHE would be the baby’s full-time caretaker when I went back to work. She “wouldn’t have us entrusting her grandson to strangers.”
I immediately felt uncomfortable with this for so many reasons, but to list just a few: 1.) she lives an hour away, so the only way she could provide M-F childcare would be for her to stay at our house during the week, especially since she’s unable to drive at night. I’m not keen on having my MIL living with us 90% of the time; 2.) she smokes a lot and often smells like cigarettes, and I have a problem with my baby being exposed to secondhand smoke; 3.) she’s just kind of sketchy, and associates with sketchy people that I wouldn’t want around my child. Case in point: her good friend, whom she invited on our recent family vacation, served 17 years on drug dealing and assault charges, and was recently arrested again for dealing crack. He is now serving another 20 years in federal prison. That’s just one example to give you an idea of the type of crowd she runs with. I could honestly write an entire post just about her questionable past, but I don’t think she does those types of things anymore... Still, I just don’t feel good about the type of influence she’ll be on my child as he gets older, and my gut instinct is to keep her at arms length.
Despite all these things, my husband wanted us to give her a shot. He said she was good with babies, that it would be the greatest joy of her life to care for her grandson, that when it came to our baby we could trust her implicitly, etc. And besides, we’d be saving thousands on childcare. I wanted to believe this so badly—after all, she’s not a completely terrible person. She has helped us so much financially over the years, she clearly just wants to help us live a good life however she can, and even though she always gave me a bit of a bad vibe, her heart really always did seem like it was in the right place. I felt like maybe I was just being a judgmental asshole, and so I always tried to give her the benefit of the doubt even when she did things that made me uncomfortable or pushed my boundaries.
But after I had the baby, things quickly spun out of control.
I had a seriously difficult pregnancy and a traumatic birth that I’m still healing from, mentally and physically. My baby was stuck in my pelvis for over 12 hours, and the overnight nurse who was attending my birth was very young, brand new to L&D and had no idea how to help me. My epidural failed and I was in excruciating pain, every contraction pushed the baby further into my hip and set every nerve in my body on fire. I felt like I was dying. I was praying for God to just kill me, I couldn’t take it anymore. My husband and I kept begging the nurse to call the doctor, but she kept saying it wasn’t time yet. We begged the anesthesiologist to help my pain, but she told me it was the baby’s position blocking the epidural and that there was nothing she could do, that i had a “mind over matter problem.” I was so out of my mind with pain, I was in panic-mode and just wanted it to be over, so I told the nurse I was going to push because that was my body’s natural instinct. While the baby was still firmly stuck transverse (though I didn’t know this at the time) she let me push unproductively with everything I had for the entire night, until the shift change at 8am. I later found out that all that straining was how I ended up losing over a third of my body’s total blood volume and developing a massive retroperitoneal hematoma.
Finally there was shift change and two competent nurses took over. They put me in flying cowgirl position and my baby was literally unstuck and born within 50 minutes. All that pain could have been so easily avoided if they had gotten there sooner. My baby inhaled meconium from the traumatic and prolonged birth, and I spent five days in the hospital because I was in such horrible shape. I wouldn’t be able to sit normally for the next six weeks. And that’s not even the half of it—my postpartum recovery was utterly brutal, worse than childbirth itself. I won’t go into all the gory details in this post, but suffice to say that both my OB and the hospital formerly apologized to me for what happened to me and told me the first nurse who attended me would be “reeducated.”
Even though I was in excruciating pain, struggling to breastfeed and trying to learn how to be a mom for the first time, my MIL could not wait to come over our house as soon as possible. I had made it clear to my husband that I did not want any visitors in the immediate days/weeks after giving birth, but she kept pushing and sure enough, she was in our home two weeks later. But in her defense, she did try to be helpful—she brought dinner, did laundry, washed dishes, brought me some special tea to help with my healing. I didn’t feel 100% comfortable because I still felt like I had to be “on” and play host while she was around, but I told myself she’s just trying to help, try to just be cool.
But soon she wanted to come over all the time and was texting or calling me on a daily basis. I felt pressured to let her and her husband over when I all I really wanted was some time alone to heal and bond just me and my baby.
This continued to escalate week after week until the fateful day that she dropped my newborn son on his head. I had told her a few days prior that she could come over that week to see the baby. She mentioned that she wanted to introduce her dogs to the baby at some point. I told her that would be fine—my husband and I are dog lovers, and we have a dog ourselves—so we could arrange a time and day when my husband was home for the dogs to meet him. It was important to me that my husband be there, because while these are generally well-behaved dogs, they are quite large and can jump and bark when they get excited.
I guess she took this as her green light to just show up at my house unannounced the next day with her husband and their two, 90-pound dogs. My husband was at work, it was just me alone with the baby and I wasn’t expecting the dogs to come barreling through my door. They immediately jumped on me while I held my sleeping 6 week old baby in my arms, so right away I felt panicked. They eventually calmed down, but when my MIL held the baby, she invited one of her dogs to sniff and LICK HIM IN HIS FACE. I asked to take him back so I could clean off his face, and this woman looks me dead in the eye and asks me “why” I would want to do that.
Already I’m feeling completely overwhelmed, but it got worse. She then proceeds to tell me she invited her friend, who was visiting from out of state and had just flown here on a plane, over to my house to meet the baby. This woman gets there, MIL takes the baby from me and puts him in this strange woman’s lap, and I’m having a panic attack watching these two old ladies putting their hands all over my little baby. At one point this friend of hers wasn’t holding him right and his head fell forward unsupported, so I took him away. They seemed miffed by that. I tried to diffuse the situation and said, let’s go put baby down on his activity mat. That’s when it happened.
My mother in law sat the baby’s butt down on the Fisher Price keyboard activity mat (newborn parents, you know the one—it’s the one that sings Purple Monkey). But she didn’t support his head on the way down, so my baby fell straight backwards from a seated position and hit his head. As many parents who own this toy probably know, the mat itself is quite thin, there isn’t much or any cushioning. And even though there was an area rug underneath, it’s on a hard tile floor. So his head basically slammed into a tile floor. He immediately began screaming out in pain. I was a few feet away reaching for baby’s diapers while this was all happening, and my MIL must have thought that I didn’t see her drop him—but I had my eyes on him the entire time, I saw everything. She tried to lie to me and say that she caught his head with her hand, then she said actually her foot had been under this head to break his fall. Both of these things were complete lies. I ran to my baby and tried to soothe him. I couldn’t say anything to her, I was on the verge of tears, hyperventilating and speechless, I didn’t know what to do. When she realized I wasn’t responding to her, she walked away from me and left the room leaving me all alone as I tried to soothe my hysterical baby. She went to the other side of the house and started chatting with her friend in the other room like nothing had happened.
I was in shock, so I did the only thing I could think of in that moment and texted my husband: “can you please come home right now” He tried calling me. I declined the call; I was afraid she would hear me. I texted him again: “I can’t talk on the phone right now. I just need you to come home. I’ll explain later. I’m overwhelmed, your mom brought all these dogs and people over the house and I’m scared for the baby’s safety”
He keeps trying to call me. I knew I couldn’t tell him what happened outright, that his mother has dropped our son, because he would go into full-on berserk mode and I didn’t want to make an already bad situation worse. And in that moment, I still wasn’t sure if I was overreacting. MIL’s reaction made me feel as if maybe I was. But I know how these things tend to go. Husband has a horrible temper, and if I had told him what happened he would have BLOWN UP. I didn’t need that kind of reaction right now, I just needed his backup ASAP.
Then I hear MIL’s phone ringing in the next room. It’s my husband. He tells her that he doesn’t know what’s going on there, but she and everyone else need to leave right now. I hear her become irate and she hangs up on him abruptly. I ask whats going on, what did he just say? she raises her voice at me and says “I don’t want to hear it from you!!” And she, her husband and their friend angrily storm out.
The way she snapped at me like that made me feel like the biggest POS in the world, like I had somehow done something wrong. I was alone with my baby again, shaking in the eerie silence. Baby had stopped crying by now. At least they’re all gone now, I thought. I finally had a moment to think. Immediately, I get baby in the car and rush to his ped. He’s sleeping peacefully in his car seat, but I’m still in full-on panic mode. The pediatrician looks him up and down, in his eyes and ears, feels his head. She says he looks fine, tells me the signs of concussion to look for over the next 24 hours, and sends us on our way. But the whole ride home I’m crying, trying to process what just happened.
The next day, she called me. “Im only calling to ask how’s [baby]” she tells me in a sharp, cold tone. I say he’s fine, but before I can say anymore she abruptly ends the call. For the next SIX WEEKS, we hear nothing from her. She is giving me and hubby both the cold shoulder. Honestly, this is a huge relief for me. I silently pray that she never calls me again.
Then when my son is 12 weeks, I get a text from her pleading to speak to me. So I call her, and she confesses to letting his head hit the floor and lying to me about it. She said she was embarrassed, so she lied to me so I wouldn’t know what she did. She said she has been worrying about my baby every day since.
My first reaction, as a people pleaser, was to try and remain diplomatic. In a way, I felt relieved and validated that she finally confessed to what I already knew to be true. Then she said that I’m [baby’s] mother, and that I “should’ve stood my ground” with her and “not gone quiet like that.” I was honestly stunned by this. On the one hand…. She’s actually 100% right. I was a doormat. I let her steamroll me. I should have been stronger. I should have done so many things differently. I should have protected my innocent baby.
On the other hand, how dare she try to turn this back on me? To tell me that actually I’m the one who made a mistake, that I’m a bad mom? SHE dropped him and lied about it.
My son is now 15 weeks old and i cannot move past this. She’s been over a few times since we “made amends” but each time I’ve watched her handle my son haphazardly or come close to dropping him again, and I’ve had to whisk him away. I’m on edge, hovering over her the entire time she’s here. I’ve realized that she simply isn’t a safe person to have around my son, point blank. But the more I reflect on everything that happened, the angrier I get. I can’t even stand to look at her. I don’t want her anywhere near my family ever again. But she keeps calling and texting asking when she can come over again.
I’m at a loss. I feel so traumatized by everything that’s happened to me these past 3.5 months, and she has made these feelings 1000x worse. I don’t necessarily want to completely deprive my son of a relationship with his grandmother, but I don’t know if I can ever move past this. I relive that day over and over. It’s eating me up inside.
