To be angry that someone came to my birth when I didn't want them to?

[Seline]

Had an emergency cesarean under very traumatic circumstances during which I nearly died and so did my twins. The whole night was horrendous. When I woke up from my cesarean, my mother in law was there. I felt hurt and confused and didn't know what was going on.

She didn't stay long but she also had my brother and sister in law (adults not children or teens) in the waiting room. As soon as DH had text her to say "She's been rushed to theatre" she just decided to turn up with them.

Four months later I'm still angry about this. Am I being unfair?

All babies need and expect in the first days are their mother. The father is not a patient. His needs shouldn't be disregarded but they certainly shouldn't come first

And some babies are taken straight to SCBU and mum is in ICU and too ill to be with them (me). Dad is the only person able to be with baby and has to deal with that on his own. It's awful. I had issues to work through but so too did my DH. It wasn't a competition as to who had it worse.

Family support is absolutely vital bray, as are fathers. I haven't seen anyone say otherwise. But the needs/wants of ANY visitor to hospital come second to the actual patient. Always.

tbf op if you got on reallyweill beforehandperhaps she genuinely thought you would want to see her

if u w3erent in icu then you were stable and they werent concerned about you so on your private room mil obviously assumed wrong that she could be there

@ILoveBray no one is saying fathers aren't important. Far from it. But in a situation where a woman has just given birth, and especially when she's experienced trauma and/or major surgery, his needs don't even come into it. Hers are paramount - and if those needs including having her mum there, and asking the in laws to back off for a bit, then they should be respected. That may seem unreasonable to others, but it won't kill people to put a new mother's needs first. The men can take a back seat for once, unless they start giving birth any time soon.

I still can't forgive my ex MIL & my ex husband's family for the way they treated me after I gave birth to DS & he is 15 now, they ruined my marriage & played a massive part in the reasons I was so unhappy & walked away from my marriage. I had a horrific birth, I was admitted due to pre eclampsia, had a failed induction that lasted nearly 3 days, then had an EMCS that left me in high dependency fighting for my life. The morning after DS was born, I was in high dependency, my liver & kidneys were failing, I was having blood transfusions & drugs to try & get my organs working again, I had drains, catheters, so many drips that I lost count, was out of it on morphine & other drugs to try & reduce my blood pressure, I was so bloated that I couldn't open my eyes properly, I looked like someone had blown me up like a balloon. The only people I wanted to see were my husband & my parents. My ex MIL & SIL marched in the ward, it wasn't visiting time, my parents had been allowed in as I had been asking for them, my mum was caring for me & DS, she had washed me & managed to change me out of the bloodstained theatre gown from the night before, put me maternity pads & pants on, wiped the vomit out of my hair & tied it back, spoon fed me some jelly & sliced banana which were the only things I could keep down in between feeding & settling DS. MIL & SIL claimed the only chairs in the room & unpacked their picnic lunch from M & S, never asked how me, DH & DS were, totally ignored my parents, my mum had just fed a very hungry & unsettled DS & managed to get him off to sleep, he had been screaming all night as the staff on the ward had been trying to force me to breast feed, I hadn't had any sleep since Friday morning, it was now Tuesday. MIL marched up to the crib, picked DS up & handed him to SIL, he started screaming again, my mum asked her to put him back in the crib as I couldn't cope with the noise, my head felt like it was going to explode, she ignored my mum, MIL & SIL started noisily discussing what they had bought in M & S. My mum slipped out of the ward & asked one of the staff to try & get them to cut their visit short, the nurse asked them to leave me in peace as I was very poorly only to be told"it doesn't matter, we are family" They stayed nearly 2 hours, taking flash pictures of DS, trying to plonk him on me so they could get a picture of DH, DS & me together, I hadn't got a free hand to hold him & was really drugged up, it was no wonder that the next time my blood pressure was taken it was even higher. DH said that he would ask them not to visit again until I was feeling better. When I eventually got home a week later, the whole family descended on us at 9.00am the next morning, the midwife was trying to check my wound while they were passing DS round as well as cups of coffee, I hadn't had chance to have a shower, I was flooding, hadn't had any breakfast, was totally shattered, just wanted the whole lot of them to bugger off & leave us alone. It never got any better & the first cracks started to appear in our marriage within a year of DS being born.

The babies were delivered, making them patients too. Putting their needs first means considering their father too.

It means putting their needs first. Again, the father’s needs don’t trump those of any of the patients involved.

If the father’s need for support is in conflict with the mother’s need for dignity and privacy, the latter wins out, and the father needs to find a workaround. Because he isn’t the patient.

Not that this was the case here.

He is not a patient. His needs must never trump that of the patients. In no other wards would visitors be considered given equal rights and regard to patients

In every other ward visitors aren't stopped from coming in unless the patient explicitly requests either no visitors or certain named visitors aren't allowed.

Would it have been better for husband to leave his wife and sit outside with his mum? Or maybe take them all to visit the babies? No one did this did they?

My parents went into SCBU to see my son before I had seen him. That hurt me unbelievably but I dealt with it. Like OP I couldn't change it and so I changed how I felt about it or should I still be angry about it 24 years later?

In every other ward visitors aren't stopped from coming in unless the patient explicitly requests either no visitors or certain named visitors aren't allowed.

In other wards there aren't the safeguarding issues that there are when tiny babies are involved. I think it's absolutely right that people are stopped from going into maternity wards (though they seem to let any Tom dick or Harry in at my local hospital!).

Would it have been better for husband to leave his wife and sit outside with his mum?

Frankly yes I think it would have been better to have seen no one when waking up than see someone you explicitly said you didn't want there.

Or he could have actually pulled his big boy pants up, and sat with his wife until she woke up. I understand he needed support but he'd have managed if his mum hadn't been available to go down I assume, he could have coped without her physical presence.

I don't see how 23 pages of saying how important the MiL is (via saying how important the father is) is going to help the OP who clearly needs therapy for a traumatic birth experience. I get it, straight away OP, I get it.

@GunpowderGelatine

I don't think you can know how you would react unless you are in that situation.

To say that he needs to put his big boy pants on is terrible.

My husband was in bits with our situation. I was 3 floors away from our baby and he didn't know who to be with. He was terrified that one of us needed him or that one of ys would die while he wasn't there.

What this shows is that we are all different. With hind sight the mil shouldn't have gone in but if this hadn't been said before I guess they were trying to do the best that they could.

I do hope OP is fully aware of everyone's wishes should an emergency occur so that she can react in accordance with their wishes. God forbid that there might be an occasion where she just has to do what she thinks is right.

It is very clear that in the OPs eyes her husband and mum can do no wrong and mil can do nothing right.

@seline Just to say - I'm appalled at the large amount of posters on here saying you were being unreasonable. I'm totally with you OP. A hospital room is a private room for recovery. Especially after such major scary surgery. I'd be livid with my husband and I would never get over it/ forgive my mother in law - if I woke up from surgery with her randomly in the room. Makes me cringe even thinking about it! Your husband should never have allowed that. People say he needed comfort - well in that situation YOU should have come first. You needed comfort. He knows you and would have known you wouldn't want unauthorised people in your recovery room and seeing you in such a vulnerable state. He let you down and I bloody hope he apologises to you for it.

You've already posted about this it seems? http://www.mumsnet.com/Talk/amiibeingunreasonable/3511789-To-ask-why-I-feel-this-way-Utterly-confused

pulled his big boy pants up again a complete minimizing of the trauma of going through the experience of watching and waiting, wondering if your wife and dc are going to die.
If we want better men we have to treat them better than this.
As a pp said it doesn't need to be a trauma competition, there is plenty to go round in this situation but we do need to support the people involved and that does include having some consideration for DH.
Honestly I think as the person giving birth in this situation I got the better out of a bad deal.

That doesn't mean MIL didn't overstep the boundaries and that OP shouldn't have trauma counseling.

@seline given your other thread where someone else did something to you after the twins birth, I really would seek some support. You sound full of anger and you need to let it our. Maybe some talking therapy where you can get it all out. I wish you all the best

dreichuplands

I completely agree, especially with the last sentence.

I would not have wanted to swap places with my husband for anything.

I can't begin to think what it must be like to think your wife and child might die.

If we want better men we have to treat them better than this.

Ah so men are so shot because they don't come first when their wives have given birth

I'm not minimising anything. Men can be traumatised from watching their wife or partner give birth. But in the immediate aftermath when she needs so much physical and emotional support - yes he can put his big boy pants on for the brief spell where she needs support more than he does.

Quite seriously I would say in the aftermath my husband needed more support. I was being looked after by medical staff. He wasn't. It took me weeks to understand what had happened but he saw it all as it happened.

I was allowed to process it at my own speed not in real time, as it was happening.

If we want to reduce toxic masculinity issues we need to accept that men experience trauma and distress and phrases like pulling up big boy pants are reductive and unhelpful. To be honest I think they are sexist clap trap.
I honestly didn't need more emotional support after this experience than my DH. In fact as I have tried to explain I needed less because I had been knocked out and was then high on Morphine. DH has spent hours sick with worry.
As for physical support, I was wired up to a battery of stuff so was going nowhere and I suspect that would be usual.
OP needed support but so did her DH.

Cross post

It's also immaterial how I feel or what I wanted.

The OP is upset by what happened to her. From what she says it's because no one realised how upset she would be, or if they did realise they did nothing to stop it. In this I blame mil, her mum and dh equally.

DM and DH if they knew, should have got nurses to make mil leave but they didn't.

It's interesting how easily OP forgives this whilst blaming mil for everything.

In the immediate aftermath of a woman giving birth, a husband's need for support shouldn't override or compromise her need for support. I won't apologise for believing women should be centred when it comes to childbirth, and I'm quite alarmed at how easily some women are happy to roll over and make it all about the men

It depends who is centering them - medical and nursing staff? Absolutely

The rest it would depend on the situation - how mum is, how baby is, where they are, what has happened.

Mum and dad can be supported without one of them being neglected. It doesn't have to be dad supporting mum of he needs support himself

Either you are elaborating on your near death situation in which case YANBU ( she shouldn’t have just tootled along to your babies birth )or you are accurate regarding your near death experience and therefore YABU ( she was supporting her son)

if your MIL hadn’t been there this could have been presented as ‘my MIL is so uncaring she couldn’t even be arsed to turn up at the hospital to support me and DH when I had life threatening surgery’.

What she did sounds ok to me OP , she wasn’t present at the birth and she kept other members to the extended family at a distance in the waiting room but it sounds as if you don’t like her and so she can’t do right for doing wrong.