A Grieving Mom Attended A Family Event After Losing Her Baby, But An Unexpected “Surprise” Made Her Pain Even Worse
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If the only certainty in life is death, the chances are that you are going to encounter a lot of grief through the course of your life. That’s how it goes, and it’s something that we shouldn’t shy away from. Because grief is a natural part of being human, and no matter how long your grief lasts – nor how messy it is – it is acceptable. After all, you’ve just lost someone you deeply loved, and the intensity of that deep despair is something that very little in life can compare to.
So imagine the grief when the mom in this story lost one of her twin baby sons, just six months after he was born. This was understandably a terrible time for the whole family, with the woman and her husband devastated by their loss. Of course, their family were also grieving and feeling the tragic loss deeply, which may have led to the horrifying error of judgement that her sister in law was about to unleash on her.
Read on to find out what happened.
AITA for telling my sister in law that the reborn baby she gave me was disturbing and inappropriate?
I recently lost one of my twins, he was six months old.
I don’t really want to go into the details, but it has been extremely difficult for me and my husband. It hasn’t even been two months, so I’m still very much grieving.
Before this happened, my sister in law and I were actually really close.
She loved my boys and was always around them, so I know she loved my son who passed away. I am not questioning that.
But what her sister in law did recently had her questioning a lot of other things.
Yesterday my husband’s mom had a small birthday party at her house.
It was basically just immediate family, kids, grandkids, etc.
At the party, my sister in law stood up and started talking about how we should hold our children close because you never know when the last time you’ll get to hold them will be.
In the middle of the speech, she handed me a reborn baby doll…
And this reborn baby doll gave her quite the shock.
The doll looked almost exactly like my baby. I mean REALLY looked like him.
It wasn’t a random baby doll, that **** was made to resemble him, and my sister in law even had one of the toenails painted because I used to paint one of their toenails to tell them apart… like what?
She handed me the doll and basically said, “So you can have both your babies.”
My flabbers were gasted. I took the doll in the moment because I didn’t want to make a scene at their MOM’s birthday party, but I was extremely uncomfortable.
Let’s see how she dealt with the situation after the fact.
I pulled her aside and told her that I thought what she did was weird and distasteful and that it really upset me.
I asked her why she would give me something like that when my baby had literally just died.
She got mad and started saying things like, “You think I’m trying to be funny?” and “You think I didn’t love my nephew?”
She basically acted like I was accusing her of not caring about my son. She also said something along the lines of, “Who do you think you are? We accepted you.”
Yikes. Read on to find out how things are now.
That’s not what I was saying at all. I know she loved my son. I know she was trying to do something for me.
But that doesn’t change the fact that receiving a realistic doll that looks like my dead baby, in front of my entire family, during a speech about losing children, was extremely upsetting to me.
I never took the doll home. I left it there. Now we’re not speaking.
I understand that everyone grieves differently, and maybe some people would find something like this comforting. But I personally found it disturbing and painful, especially considering how recent my son’s death was.
AITA?
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Wow. Sure, you can see what the sister in law was trying to do, but wow.
Any kind of grief is difficult, but losing a young child is horrific, and it’s entirely up to the mom how she chooses to grieve the loss of her baby.
Gestures like this could be appreciated, but for the most part a mom does not want a doll of their baby as some sort of weird replacement, they want their baby – and that’s why you ask before doing anything like this.
Let’s see what folks on Reddit had to say about this.
This person agreed that the sister in law was majorly in the wrong here.
While others thought that she could have meant well, but went about everything in completely the wrong way.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this postabout a man who thought he was staying with his brother for a month in his 1-bedroom Tokyo apartment, then got hit with a list of local hotels.
Meanwhile, this Redditor thought that the grieving mom’s gut reaction was entirely appropriate in light of the gift.
There is a world in which the sister in law thought she was doing a really kind thing. Maybe she believed that having a physical representation of her son would bring the grieving mom peace and help her with her healing. But the key thing is that she thought that. She never checked what the mom herself thought, and just dropped the gift on her without any explanation. Following this up with her reaction when confronted suggests that this was actually all about her, with her words cutting almost as deep as her thoughtless actions.
Because for this mom, her son is gone, and no doll that looks like him will ever bring him back. The very fact that the sister in law thought that this would allow the mom to ‘hold her son again’ shows just how clueless she is, because no object will ever replace the deceased son, and she would never want some kind of creepily similar proxy to lie where her son was supposed to be. Sure she might have been trying to help, but she failed spectacularly.
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