What's the most insensitive thing anyone has ever said to you?

[whatathingtosay]

Was at BIL's wedding on Saturday - lovely day, popular couple, huge guest list, big party. It was basically the opposite of ours, which was family-only, small, quiet, over very quickly.

On the dance floor, MIL comes stomping along (out of time) and says: "It's lovely isn't it. Do you now realise now how staid your own wedding was?"

Now, my own wedding was going to be quite big and friendly. But it got cancelled and had to be replanned. One of several reasons it got cancelled and had to be replanned was MIL's domineering behaviour! By the time we got to organising it a second time, I didn't have the emotional energy to invest in anything big, so I just had the simplest wedding possible.

I think pretty much everyone who knows me well realises how hurt and humiliated I felt by the whole thing, and how much DH and I struggled through that period. So for her to bring it up in the middle of a happy day celebrating BIL was just staggering. I honestly didn't know where to put myself - I just physically froze in the middle of the song 'We Are Family' (oh the irony).

On a disabled/benefits bashing thread another Mumsnetter said 'we cant afford you'.

In the hospital after I had a miscarriage at 20 weeks my MIL said 'it's probably for the best'. Yes it was unplanned and we were quite young (early 20's) but it was such an insensitive comment.

Seems an awful lot of insensitive comments are related to pregnancy loss or infertility.

Mine too - from being told a miscarriage is “Nature’s way...” and “part of God’s plan” to being told by my boss on return to work after a second miscarriage that a colleague had just found out she was pregnant, so that was “something to cheer you up”.

More recently, while buying stuff for our long awaited baby (through surrogacy), I had two shop assistants ask if it was my first grandchild. Um, thanks?!

DM had an old school friend of hers doing some work in her house, there was a photo of me and her from my 21st Birthday, school friend comments to her "you're daughter's pretty" DM replies "really?
Never thought of her as pretty". She felt the need to tell me this why exactly?!?!

I was just constantly being told I was fat as a child, and not in a nice way either. My ballet teacher telling me I had the fattest stomach in the class and shouldn't eat dinner before ballet (er my mum had made me?! I was like 7), a friend of my parents adjusting a seatbelt to fit me (which was where her daughter, three years younger than me usually sat) saying 'Oooh Penelope's too fat! She doesn't fit in the seat!', my MUM even pointing out that certain dresses didn't suit me due to my body shape.

By the time I was 15 I had an eating disorder and was properly skinny. At which point my mum threw a hissy fit and made it all about her and what she had done wrong and how I was punishing her. Hmmm maybe you should have responded just a MITE more sensitively to what was only ever puppy fat - I was never medically overweight, just one of those kids that is a bit chubby. Since being an adult I have never been even slightly overweight but I can't turn off the voices in my head put there during childhood!

Thanks to all of you for sharing. These are

Kitty - I suspect a lot are mc/pregnancy/parenting related because those are the themes people have in their mind on this site - and for many, the experience is sadly still very raw. for all those suffering.

It would be interesting to know what men would say in response to the same question! Would the answers be broadly similar or very different?

My DM was notorious for saying things like "Wear your hair up - it's more slimming...", and "You should wear black more often - it's much more flattering for your fuller figure." She commented on every single bite of food she ever saw me eat. My favourite was "You should study very hard because you will never ever be beautiful."

Did 24 hour famine sponsored for charity (back in the 80s). DM said "can you you've not eaten today, you're legs looks thinner" I was about 9 years old.

everyone

My friends husband was killed in a horrendous industrial accident some years ago, it was so terrible it was in the papers.

My friend became so traumatised she had to be sectioned several times over the next few years. She is still unwell.

Apart from a young adult son ( the pressure on him was dreadful) no other family at all.

Comments to her and son from neighbours and nosey parkers include:
" You must have had a good compensation pay out"
" How much did you get in compo?"
"You will never have to work again you must be loaded"

• can tell you've not ......

"cheer up, it might never happen"... Said to me at a funeral of a close relative

I have a fat arse I am aware of this but my manager saying to my line manager about me, in an old and frankly shitty job, she needs a rocket up her arse, have to massive tho. Line manager replying never mind a rocket, you'd need about 6.

Childish but it really hurt, one thing to say you need to improve quicker ( only been there 2 weeks) another to take the piss. Resigned after that

Seems to me MIL's are often evil - mine is too. Mine tried everything to stop the wedding, binned the wedding invitation then pretended she had never had it, turned up to the wedding in her gardening cardi, when a year later told I was pregnant asked if I was going to keep it, lied to my father about me and stuff I'd supposedly done...... the list goes on, just mostly nasty, petty little digs which serve to make me feel worthless. Regularly talks about my DH's previous girlfriends in a glowing way. Any of my children's achievements are obviously entirely down to her (she sees them rarely) and her family, but the slightest faults are obviously mine. I think she's just a sad, bitter woman, who likes to hurt me. Sending hugs to you all - chin up, ladies

More infertility ones from me:

Sonographer: ‘God doesn’t make mistakes’ while performing the scans that would show my uterus is completely fucked.

My sister: ‘well, never mind, at least you’ll have a nephew’. If you asked her she’d tell you she’s super supportive of me but really she’s come out with plenty of crap like that.

When telling my uncle that DH and i were expecting our first child, he looked stunned and said "really? And do you think you'll be a good mother???"

DH and I had just been told that our chances of conceiving naturally were like 'trying to throw peas off of the top of a skyscraper and get them into a bowl below'. I confided in my family stupid me!!, my 'D'M shouted at me, told me I was stupid for believing 'man and not God' and asked why I couldn't be like a member of her congregation who was so positive. I have to remember to just not talk to her about it.

After two miscarriages my 'D'Sis would text me nonstop about her monthly cycle. We would be texting about back and forth about clothes or what she was doing to her hair next and then she would randomly ask questions like 'the ovulation stick says I'm ovulating. What does that mean? with a smiley face. She then announced that her and her unemployed boyfriend of barely a year were going to start trying for a baby as they we worried they were 'like us (infertile)'. She's got form for being stupid but this year her cruel streak has really shown itself.

Going off piste a bit but as Kitty points out so many of these are related to pregnancy and/or infertility.

I've never understood why fertility and a woman's right to/ability to/inclination to have children is basically treated as public property. I have always found it absolutely staggering that people will ask a virtual stranger what their family plans are. I would hesitate to ask this even of a very close friend or family member.

I remember a colleague once asking our then female boss, who was then in her late 30s and childless, why she hadn't had kids. She, understandably, reacted quite defensively and shut the conversation down. The colleague genuinely couldn't understand what she had said wrong and said the boss was being "chippy".

Why do people do this? It's so obvious that it has the potential to be upsetting for the person on the receiving end of the question for so many reasons.

"At least she won't be a burden to you now" - said by a villager a few days after my 22yo disabled DD had died. I had devoted my life to DD and was absolutely devasted by her sudden unexpected death and never in 22 years had I given anyone the impression that she was a burden

I think one of the worst would have been after I was discharged from hospital having been diagnosed with a life changing illness. People kept saying to me, "You've lost SO much weight, you look amazing". Doesn't sound that bad but realistically the trade off for my sudden slimness and apparent beauty was that I nearly died and that my life would be hugely altered forever. I kept the tiny pair of jeans that I fitted into around that time and no matter how much weight I've lost since I've never once fitted back into them, I was so, so small. Never forgiven them for considering that weight was more important than my health either.

Don't tend to tell MIL much as she is socially awkward, but we finally decided to fess up about us having IVF treatment. When we told her how long we'd been trying she said "oh so you were trying to beat SIL to a baby were you" (DH Sister has had 2 babies since we've been trying)

vowed never to tell them anything again.

Oh I’ve just remembered... I was going through a really stressful time aged 19 while my parents were divorcing. My friend had also just killed himself a few weeks earlier and everything was getting on top of me.

I was in the car with my Mum and I told her how stressed I was feeling and she said ‘oh well, at least no one’s died’.

I had to remind her about my friend, at which point she tried to do a whole lot of backtracking which just made it so much worse!

Two weeks after my wedding, got the photo proofs back from the photographer. Looking through them with my DM, I say "ahh it was a good day wasn't it." and she said "yes, it was a great day. Of course, I would never have let you buy that awful dress if I'd been with you". I was so shocked and felt devastated for days and days because she does not have form for that sort of thing so must have truly thought it. She saw my face and tried to back track but the damage was done.

Too soon mum, too soon!

Not said to me, but said by poisonous ex MIL

• to her daughter, after finding out I was pregnant, "she can give me grandchildren but you never could"
• to my ex, referring to him and his siblings, "I should never have had any children"

And many other similar hurtful things along those lines.

Again, all related to having or not having children. Everything else is bounce-backable, but those subjects are just painful to the core.

Sorry for everyone who's been through a pregnancy loss. It feels like we just don't know how to react to that sort of bereavement, and so just react in abysmal ways? Either ignoring it or making light of it etc?

I have loads of MIL ones following a stillbirth at term, but they make me very angry to rehash. One of DH's colleagues looked at the holiday calendar a few months after our loss, and said out loud in front of the entire team "oh BisquickDH you're taking off the week after the school hols? Oh of course I forget, you don't have to worry about kids and their school holidays".

I don't think she was being intentionally cruel - she just probably forgot? Because he's a man and she didn't see him visibly get pregnant etc so probably didn't realise? She definitely knew about it but v odd.

Have a few MIL ones too.

MIL hates me because DH and I met online. The first time I met her I was 19 and terrified, DH was my first boyfriend so I had no idea what to expect. DH is also over 10 years older than me. I turn up in my most conservative and parent friendly outfit and you can smell the desperation dripping off me. I need her to like me. DH and his dad leave the room and MIL says 'He told me you met online. Normal people don't meet like that. I was really surprised that he did something like that'. She then tried to interrogate me as to the exact website we used.

She then found DH (then DBf) a job in their village, almost 200 miles away from where we were living and spent her Saturdays calling him up telling him to leave me because I was a nasty person. She would call for hours at a time. Spineless DH just let her keep talking.

Once we were engaged, she uninvited 10 people out of a total guest list of 38 but waited until we had let them know we had paid the £249 per head and confirmed with her that she was coming. That would have been £2490 we wouldn't be able to get back.