Pregnant Woman Refuses To Allow Mother-In-Law In Delivery Room Unless Her Husband Lets Her Dad Watch His Private Medical Procedure
Her mother-in-law won't back down and her husband won't back her up. So she gave him an ultimatum.
Gorodenkoff / Shutterstock.com Nowadays the concept of family gathered around the delivery room during a birth is starting to seem so weird it's hard to believe it was ever considered standard procedure.
Times have definitely changed, though, and for one woman who's refusing to be put on display while she gives birth, it's caused all kinds of conflict with her in-laws, and she's having to fight fire with fire.
The mom-to-be banned her mother-in-law from the delivery room unless her husband agreed to let her dad invade his privacy.
It used to be a pretty standard tradition that family members would be in the delivery room when women gave birth. But that tradition always seemed to be at least partly based on outdated ideas about what women's roles were. The belief was that becoming a mother was a woman's duty, and part of that duty was to let the entire family share in the moment.
Times, of course, have changed — thankfully. And now, more and more women are refusing to abide by this often humiliating tradition.
For a woman on Reddit however, this was causing major consternation with her mother-in-law.
She and her mother-in-law never got along, and now it was only getting worse.
"She is an unpleasant and pushy woman and none of her own daughters have allowed her near them when they gave birth," the woman wrote of her mother-in-law in her Reddit post.
"I have zero interest in letting that judgemental old woman see me down there," she continued. "She has objected to me from the beginning because I have tattoos and am not in any way interested in being a stay-at-home wife."
Her husband refused to back her up on her decision to ban her mother-in-law from the delivery room.
It's certainly not unreasonable to want some privacy during one of the most terrifying and exposing events a woman can experience in her life. It's also not unreasonable to expect your husband to back you up when your overbearing mother-in-law insists she's somehow entitled to see you splayed open like a can of sardines on an operating table.
But despite all the myriad times her husband put his foot down with his mother, from their wedding to her trying to dictate where they live, in this situation he's proved entirely too malleable.
She issued her husband an ultimatum: She banned her mother-in-law from the delivery room unless he let her dad watch him get a colonoscopy.
"She has started crying to him that all she wants is to see a grandchild being born," she wrote of her mother-in-law. "All her friends have experienced it and she wants it. He is starting to crumble under her emotional blackmail."
So she came up with a compromise for her husband. "I made it clear that the only way I would agree was if, before the birth, my husband made arrangements for my father to witness him getting a colonoscopy."
She reasoned that "he would need a ride anyways so two birds one stone, you know." Sure a colonoscopy is not anywhere near as revealing and potentially humiliating as giving birth, but for a man, it's pretty much the closest thing, right?
Unsurprisingly, though, her husband wasn't having it and she had the perfect response. "He said I'm being ridiculous," she wrote, "but I said none of my brothers would let my dad see them getting a camera shoved up their [backside] and he felt left out." LOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOLOL.
It woke her husband up, but her mother-in-law was still pitching a fit.
"I offered to change [the deal] to me watching her get a Brazilian wax and she hasn't called in a week," the mom-to-be said of her mother-in-law in a hilarious ending to her story.
In the end, there is no debate here. Nobody owes it to anyone to let them watch them give birth.
As one person on Reddit put it, "Giving birth is not a spectator sport. No means no," and it really is that simple. Several others suggested she alert the nurses to who is and is not allowed in the delivery room to make sure her mother-in-law was kept out.
But there's an even simpler solution, too. "My sister-in-law was worried about people coming to the hospital so she just straight up didn’t tell anyone when she was going into labor," another Redditor wrote. "We got a text a couple days after the birth that had a picture of the baby."
That just might be the best way to handle this since her mother-in-law seemed determined. As the Redditor went on to say, "There are some situations where you just gotta not put up with all the [bologna]." Hear, hear.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice, and human interest topics.