For many of us, having family over means rushing to get the house cleaned and mentally preparing ourselves for the onslaught of questions about our personal lives.
But what if you had certain family members who kept visiting your house completely uninvited and unannounced?
That’s what one woman on Reddit is having to deal with, as her mother-in-law never calls before she turns up on the woman’s doorstep.
The woman, who became a first-time mum just eight weeks ago, said both she and her husband have asked the mother-in-law to call first – but she doesn’t think family should have to.
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She wrote: “I had a baby eight weeks ago and since then my mother-in-law has had a habit of popping by without calling first. I have anxiety at the best of times but it's a bit worse right now and when she comes over, particularly when my husband is at work and not there to mediate.
“I find her constant stream of advice and thinly-veiled criticism (for example: looking intently at the floor while saying, ‘You must not have a vacuum cleaner. I'll bring one next time I'm over’) to be just too much to handle.
“Both my husband and I have asked that she call before coming over, but she brushes it off, saying that family shouldn't have to call.”
The mum then admitted that after having a particularly bad day last week, she decided to avoid all contact with her mother-in-law – by pretending she wasn’t at home.
She added: “Last week I was having a rough day and was tired as the baby had been up in the night more than usual. I looked out the bedroom window to see my mother-in-law walking through the front gate and I honestly wanted to cry.
“I'm not proud of it, but I sat on the floor of the bedroom ignoring the doorbell until she went away. I felt really bad after, because she doesn't drive and I knew it would have taken her a 20-minute bus ride to get to our house, just to have to turn around and go back.
“Apparently, she called my husband at work to let him know that she'd tried to visit me, because he called home to see if everything was okay.
“I told him she must have come while I was out with the baby for a walk, because I didn't want to admit that I had hidden from his mother.”
The mum was forced to tell her husband the truth when he came home from work and saw that their baby’s stroller hadn’t been moved – and she now thinks she “did something really awful” by hiding from her mother-in-law.
She said: “That evening when he got home, he noticed that the baby's stroller was in the corner with the diaper bag in it, as he'd left it the previous day, so he figured out I hadn't taken the baby for a walk after all.
“I admitted that I hadn't answered the door for his mom even though I was home and he said that he knows she can be difficult, but that it was still an a**hole move to make her spend 40 minutes on transit to not even see me or her grandchild.
“He brought it up a couple of times over the holidays (just to me - he didn't tell her) and now I feel like maybe I did something really awful.”
Commenters on the Reddit post were quick to reassure the woman that she was right to ignore her mother-in-law’s visit – with many saying she should have called first.
One person wrote: “She has to call before coming. The fact that she sat on the bus for 40 minutes without seeing her grandchild is her own problem.”
While another said: “She wasn't invited, and she can't just pop by unexpected like that. You have things to do, and entertaining annoying and unwanted guests is not one of them.”
What do you think? Let us know in the comments below.
