Should in-laws always be present for the birth of a child?
It’s no secret that navigating in-law relationships is one of the hardest parts of marriage, because while a person gets to choose who they want to marry, they don’t get to choose the family that comes along with that decision.
While it’s important to set boundaries with in-laws, it’s also important to set expectations. But what is a person to do when they feel that their in-law, or parent, has let them down in a big way?
These realities were highlighted in a recent online post in which a woman misses the birth of her grandchild to attend a wedding instead, and feels justified in doing so.
Should in-laws always be present for the birth of a child?
An online post published on October 1st, reported on by Taylor McCloud from Newsweek, has gone viral with an impressive 14,100 upvotes and 3,500 comments.
The author starts off by explaining that she has two daughters, Sophia who is 32 and Nichole who is 26. She goes on to state that both women are ‘wonderful’, and that they have an incredibly positive relationship with one another.
With that said, the author was getting ready to walk her daughter Nichole down the aisle at her wedding this past weekend, and then later was going to travel to Sophia to help take care of her baby who was set to born in several weeks.
However, the family received a real shock when Sophia went into labor three weeks early, the afternoon before Nichole’s wedding. At this point, the mother had to decide what she was going to do.
What is more important? A wedding or the birth of a child?
The author missed the first call from her son-in-law, but eventually got her daughter on the phone. Sophia wanted her mom to come ‘as soon as possible’, which was tricky with the wedding. Nichole moved up her ceremony time in order to accommodate the situation, so that right after the ceremony her mom could make her way to Sophia’s side. The author thought this was a ‘good compromise’.
She was able to make it to the hospital by the next afternoon, but that unfortunately meant that she had missed the birth by a couple of hours. Sophia was ‘so mad’ at her mother that she wouldn’t let her into the hospital room. Her son-in-law has also expressed that the two of them are furious with her for ‘ditching’ Sophia to attend a party when she ‘needed her mom most’.
What do you think? Did the author let her eldest daughter down by not dropping everything at the exact moment she got the call? Or did the author do the best she could in an impossible situation, and what she chose to do was indeed a good compromise?
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