New Mom Accused Of 'Withholding' For Refusing To Let Mother-In-Law Take Her Newborn For 24 Hours To 'Feel Like A Mother Again'
You already had your babies, ma'am.
ezoom | Getty Images | Canva Pro It often seems like some people's primary motivation for having children is to relive their own life vicariously through their kids, creating little receptacles that they can pour their own angst into rather than deal with it. The "almond mom" dumps her weight insecurities on her kids, the overeager sports dad exorcises his own feelings of failure by bullying his kid from the sidelines at Little League, and so on.
They basically try to merge with their child to make up for lost time (and often become furious when that child turns out to be different than what they expected). People play this same game with their grandchildren, too, and a new mom on Reddit has found herself in an unhinged situation with her mother-in-law because of it.
A new mom's mother-in-law is trying to relive motherhood with her newborn grandchild.
Mothers-in-law and grandparents with poor boundaries are nothing new, but this new mom's situation takes it to a new weird and pathological level. She and her husband just had their new baby two weeks ago, and her "intense" mother-in-law is already crossing lines.
"Before the birth, she kept saying she wanted to 'be really hands-on' because she 'missed out' on raising her own kids (her words, because she worked a lot)," she wrote in her Reddit post. And that has resulted in her mother-in-law making some requests that are frankly insane, and having an insane reaction to being told "no" in response.
Her mother-in-law wants to take their newborn overnight to feel like a parent again.
"Last night she came over and asked if she could take the baby for a full 24 hours to 'get a feel for parenting again,'" the mom wrote. And it gets worse: She also wants to take the baby "before we 'settle into bad habits.'"
The layers of unhinged here are myriad. Expecting to have an overnight with a two-week-old baby is absolutely bonkers, and asking to insinuate yourself to protect the baby from the parenting skills you've automatically assumed are lacking is wildly inappropriate.
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Understandably, the mom said "absolutely not," for a whole list of reasons, not the least of which is that she's nursing, and she and her husband have barely had time to establish their parenting routines themselves. It will probably not shock you to hear that her mother-in-law's response was as unhinged as her request in the first place.
The mother-in-law said the mom is 'gatekeeping' and ruining her 'do-over' of motherhood.
When the mom told her mother-in-law that there was no way in this world or the next she was handing over a two-week-old nursing infant for a sleepover at grandma's house, "she got upset and said I’m 'gatekeeping motherhood' from her and that this is her 'do-over.'"
There's just one problem, of course: There's no such thing as a "do-over" of motherhood, and this entire thing is insane. Your grandchild is not your baby. You already had yours. If you're unhappy with the way you raised them, you should hash that out with a therapist, not your two-week-old infant grandchild!
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Thankfully, the mom's husband is not the usual kind of son of this kind of mother-in-law and stood up to his mother that this was not happening. But the rest of the family is furious, raking them over the coals for hurting the mother-in-law's feelings and supposedly ruining her opportunity to "bond" with her grandchild.
Psychologists say situations like this are very common and require firm boundaries.
Just as parents trying to live vicariously through their kids is incredibly common, so is grandparents trying to do what this woman seems to be attempting: To make up for past mistakes by turning their grandchildren into "do-overs."
Mental health professionals say both can be incredibly damaging. One study found a direct correlation between overbearing grandparents and behavior and emotional problems in grandchildren, for example. These battles between parents and battles play out in 1 in 4 families, according to some studies, and mental health professionals all agree that the only remedy is setting firm boundaries.
While her intentions may be good, what this grandma is asking for is not just inappropriate but potentially dangerous. And while relationship experts like Drs. Julie and John Gottman say acknowledging grandma's very real feelings is key to navigating a situation like this successfully, the bottom line is that grandma's angst over her own parenting mistakes is nobody's problem but her own.
It's not this mom or anyone else's responsibility to accommodate her, and not being willing to do so isn't "gatekeeping motherhood." Because grandma isn't the baby's mother in the first place.
John Sundholm is a writer, editor, and video personality with 20 years of experience in media and entertainment. He covers culture, mental health, and human interest topics.
