After three gruelling years of infertility, I’m due my first baby in six weeks’ time, and throughout my pregnancy MIL has been making comments about things going wrong. Today she noticed via Instagram that we’ve bought a cot, and texted to say that she thinks it’s wrong to buy big things in advance, in case something bad happens. She said the same when we were visiting her a month ago – that we were ‘brave’ to have bought things, because something might still happen. These hints about the possibility of a stillbirth feel horribly inappropriate and insensitive, especially as the due date is approaching. I got a bit upset about it this evening.
It goes further back too. She visited us when I was 13 weeks pregnant, and treated me to detailed stories of everyone she’s ever known who either had a stillbirth, a miscarriage, or themselves almost died in childbirth. It was barrel-scraping stuff – her neighbour’s cousin’s bridesmaid, that sort of thing. I did ask her to stop, but she smiled and carried on.
Before that, when we told her I was pregnant at about 6 weeks, her first response was to tell us not to get excited because my endometriosis means I have a ‘toxic womb’.
She has four healthy children and has never experienced a miscarriage (she told me it had never happened to her while regaling me with tales of others’ losses), so it’s not that she’s over-anxious based any losses of her own. She also has five healthy grandchildren. My own pregnancy has been healthy throughout, thankfully.
I just don’t get it. How normal is this sort of behaviour? Has anyone else experienced it, and did you just brush it off in the end?