My Mother-in-Law Turned Her Back on My Newborn Daughter Because She Was a Girl — But I Wasn’t About to Let That Go Unanswered

Still, I was happy. Truly.

My husband, Jake, was endlessly gentle and caring.

“Just don’t stress, honey. Sleep more. Eat your broccoli.”

But his mother Sheila… Oh, she’d been sighing dramatically since our very first ultrasound. Not about the baby’s health — no, that barely interested her. But it was about something far more important to her.

“If it’s a girl, I honestly don’t know how I’ll cope…”

“Cope with what, exactly?” I asked, even though I already knew the script by heart.

“Well, we only have boys in our family! I had three brothers, my husband had two! Jake is the first grandson! Imagine how it’ll look — a girl?!”

“Were you a boy too?” I muttered once under my breath.

“Oh, darling, girls rarely grow into brilliant women like me.”

I rolled my eyes. All I wanted — just one day of silence. Just one.

She Took Over My Pregnancy Like It Was Her Own

To say Sheila was “involved” in the pregnancy would be like calling a tornado “a bit windy.” She unilaterally decided the nursery should be blue and painted it herself while I was home, gagging through morning sickness.

She lit bundles of mystery herbs from her “fertility rituals Facebook group” and paraded through the apartment chanting things like:

“Strong seed, strong son!”

Moreover, my MIL had me rubbing my belly clockwise with warm oil at 3 p.m. sharp every Thursday, and once tried to sneak a fertility crystal into my smoothie.

All that — and we hadn’t even reached the third trimester.