Going back to work after having a baby sucks, especially if you live in a country without a solid maternity leave policy.

Having to leave your baby just weeks after giving birth? It’s inhumane.

But that is how it is for many women, meaning that finding someone to take care of the child is of the utmost importance.

Of course, it needs to be someone you trust if they’re going to be taking care of your precious infant – and with a combination of a professional babysitter and her mother-in-law, the new mom in this story thought she’d found the perfect solution.

Read on to find out how it very quickly became clear that this was sadly, not the case.

AITA for not wanting my mother-in-law to watch my baby any more?

I am a 30-year-old woman, and my husband is 28.

We had a baby a couple of months ago, and I just went back to work full time.

Our baby goes to a babysitter three days per week, and my mother-in-law comes over once a week to watch her.

Let’s see how that situation is panning out for them.

During my first week back at work I was already a wreck from leaving my ten week old baby – and then, to make it worse, I found out that my mother-in-law took my baby out to breakfast at a busy restaurant without asking.

She told my husband that this was a possibility, but no one asked if I was okay with it.

In the second week, the baby had just gotten her shots and wasn’t feeling well, super fussy, so I told my husband to tell his mom that I didn’t feel comfortable with her going out again while her immune system was low.

They didn’t go out to breakfast this time, but she did take baby from home to my her house. Again, no one told me.

But it was this working mom that had to deal with the consequences of this.

Needless to say, I got home to a very grumpy baby who she didn’t sleep all day because she wasn’t at home with all of her comfort items.

During the third week, my husband apparently talked to his mom about communicating going places in the group chat we have to make sure it is okay with both of us.

But I didn’t trust her, so I hid the baby’s diaper bag so she would have to either ask where it was or go rifling through our house to try to find it.

I was right that she was trying to take my baby out without asking again, because part way through the morning she asked where the diaper bag was because she wanted to go to breakfast again.

She still wasn’t asking if she could take my baby out, but at least I wasn’t finding out about it after the fact.

And this situation just kept getting worse and worse.

The next week was Halloween and she took my baby to a trunk or treat event at her work. I found out about it after the fact, when my husband said he was on his way home which the baby after going to the event.

I thought he had just collected her from home – where I assumed she’d been all day – and took her to see his mom and her coworkers.

But no, he was picking up my baby from the trunk or treat, because his mom took her there because she was working it.

I don’t know how long she was outside in that weather. I don’t know who touched her, who held her. I know nothing.

But that wasn’t the end of her frustrations with her mother-in-law.

Now we jump to what she has been doing to my home. She is being “helpful” in my husband’s words, but I think it’s weaponized incompetence.

She washes the baby’s bottles: so why are they all still dirty after I get them out of the sterilizer?

I stayed up so late having to clean every bottle because all of them still had milk scum on them. Every. Single. One.

Not only that but she put multiple things in the sterilizer that did not belong in the sterilizer, therefore ruining them.

Intentionally or not, she’s sick of the way her mother-in-law keeps messing up.

Our old dog poops on the floor sometimes, and we have a cleaning routine that we do when that happens, with a nice wood floor cleaning solution.

Well, the dog pooped while she was gone with baby (at least this time I knew they were going out) so she cleaned it up before I got home.

She used a solution with hydrogen peroxide as the main ingredient, and now our oak wood floor is trash.

I came home from work those days with so much anxiety and anger, and this wasn’t even all of it. So am I wrong for no longer wanting her to babysit?

AITA?

Accidents happen and sometimes oversights are made, but with these consistent miscommunications and calamities, it’s no wonder that this woman is becoming increasingly anxious about leaving her baby with her mother-in-law.

She needs to be able to trust her with her baby, and her mother-in-law keeps breaching that trust.

It’s unfair and it’s unsustainable, threatening to ruin the relationship that they have altogether.

Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.

This person thought that she would be right to stop her mother-in-law babysitting.

While others empathised, and thought that her husband should start doing the same.

Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that she should put her baby and her own mental health first.

With her mother-in-law consistently stomping all over the boundaries she’s made for her child, it’s no wonder that she doesn’t trust her.

And this anxiety that she has whenever her mother-in-law is babysitting is going to be hugely detrimental to both her mental health and her work performance, so one way or another it needs to be solved.

Either her husband needs to put his foot down with his mom, or they need to stop her babysitting altogether.

Because right now, she’s being hugely disrespectful.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.