My mother-in-law teaches that grandparenting class. When our first was born, she showed up with pajama pants for me, 3 stools to make breastfeeding easier/comfier in any room, (stolen?) hospital-grade hand sanitizer for our visitors, and a diaper bag for my husband. She also bought gifts for the baby, but she saw us as people and tried to support our own needs. Love that woman.
I was pleased at the time, but every year my sense of joy at her generosity and good sense has doubled. I absolutely plan to treat my future children-in-law like she treats me.
As new parents, we didn't want/need anyone to come over and hold our baby. Holding the baby is the easy, fun part. What we needed was someone to do all the things that you can't easily do while holding a baby: laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing toilets, etc. My stepmom was everything our birth moms were not. When they came to visit for a week, she came in quietly and did it all without us even having to ask. My dad ran all the errands, brought all the food, and said things like this regularly: " [New baby] is amazing, but watching you become a mom is even more amazing." I cried a lot of happy, grateful tears that week.
I have an almost 3mo son and in the thick of this right now. My MIL visits weekly, brings her house clothes, snacks, iPad, sets up on the couch, takes the baby, and stays for half a day. She aggressively insists that my husband and I leave to go do something. She of course wants alone time with her grandson, but we never would have gone out for fun(!!) if she didn't push for it, and Saturdays have become a play day for us.
The Don't are almost comical to me because it is exactly what my MIL did in the first years after having a baby. In one memorable instance we asked her to day babysit for a weekend concert and over one evening asked I make her a v specific dinner ("But you're so good at cooking!"), asked repeatedly why I don't hire a housekeeper, and waxed poetic about how much she loved being a mother and just *couldn't bear* the thought of working (I work full time and had a weekday nanny). It got so bad we ended up having to tell her we needed a break from her "help" and didn't see her for the holidays this year. Things are mildly better now but it made the first two years so much harder than it needed to be.
On the other hand, my kinda-a-drunk and v unstable mom got on medication, stopped drinking, sends a package of baby clothes every season, and has been insanely helpful with kindness and support. She can't really watch the kid but she's become a rock for talking through issues and keeping me grounded. It's all relative I think. I'd love a babysitter grandma but instead I got my mom back and that's worth more than I can say.
I mentioned craving watermelon a few days postpartum (the breastfeeding thirst was hitting hard). My MIL went out, got me a watermelon, and chopped up the entire thing without being asked. I saw it in the fridge at my 3am pumping session and just stood at the counter shoving watermelon into my mouth; nothing has ever tasted so good in my entire life.
My mom is just the best too, always making sure to tell me how proud she is of me and that I'm such a good mom. I'll never forget the time she looked at me holding my baby and said that now I would understand how much she loved me.
My parents live an hour away, and my mom would come stay for part of the week (Weds-Sat normally) while I was on maternity leave for both babies. It was invaluable. She knew what to do to be helpful and would just do it without being asked, she took the baby at night (!!!), and if I needed something, I could just tell her what to do and she would do it without a word (unlike my husband). Love someone I can just boss around without it being weird. My husband was deep in his alcohol dependence and depression after our first was born, plus he had no experience with babies, so I honestly could not have survived that + my own PPD (plus putting our beloved dog down 2 months after birth) without her. We moved when our surprise second was 2 mos, and again, it would’ve been impossible without her. My dad on the other hand showed up completely unannounced at 9am like 4 days after I came home with my second and I was so so so mad. I had said many times that for the first 2 weeks while I had the baby blues, I basically only wanted people in my house who would not freak out if I was topless on my couch and sobbing uncontrollably, and he’s…not it.
Not that I would have done anything differently had he said the opposite, but my dad gave me the same permission to nurse in front of him, or ask him to leave the room, and it was one of those things that I didn't realize meant something until I heard and received it.
Not me over here weeping at all the kindnesses of these grandparents! We are fresh out of the thick of it (babies at 11 months and 26 months) and our families are very far away. We had help for a week at a time here and there, but not regularly. What a gift that would have been!
I had my first during Covid, so nobody could help us, which was hard. Both sets of parents dropped off food, which was helpful, but it was certainly not the postpartum experience we imagined. (And now my three year old has trouble accepting people who aren't her parents.) My MIL has, without being asked, both done dishes and fold laundry when she's babysitting and our daughter is asleep, which I always feel kind of guilty about, but she seems genuinely happy to do it.
I'm expecting another in a couple of months, and we are excited for more help this time, especially with a needy toddler. My retired parents have basically cleared their schedules for the summer since my sister and I are both expecting, but also have made it clear we can have as much or as little help as we want, which is incredibly helpful, since I sometimes find having people around stressful.
The one thing not to do--my MIL has seven kids, and there is not a single parenting experience or moment that I have either told her about or that she watched happen that she has not compared to an experience she had with one of her children. She doesn't mean it in a "do it my way" sort of way, just relationally, but I hate it. First, we have had a lot of trouble having children, so hearing about her many, many kids makes me feel bad sometimes. Also, sometimes I just want to be in the moment with my kid, rather than hearing yet another story about one of my in-laws. So just remember that you might be trying to relate by talking about when your kids were babies, but it might not be received that way by the new parents.
My mom is a handful in many ways but she is wonderful with babies/young children. She would regularly drive 90 minutes when I was on maternity leave to 'keep me company' on random weekdays. She brought food, ran errands, and was super encouraging about nursing/pumping. She also helped me pack up my apartment and move to a new house with a 3month old so I'll forgive a lot of iffy behavior for that alone. Honestly having another parent who has 'done it' and was vocal in reassuring me that I was doing a good job was all I needed for those first few hard months.
The good: my first baby came early and we were so unprepared. During my recovery and baby’s 2 weeks in NICU my parents came to our house and put together the change table, did every piece of laundry and hired someone to paint the nursery and bathroom (which had been renovated - literally texted the plumber about final steps while waiting for my c-section).
My MIL was so sympathetic about breastfeeding issues and no one has ever said anything about me whipping out my boobs to feed a baby in a shared space.
The bad: my mum could not wrap her head around having a hard time with breastfeeding. My in-laws brought a lasagne for us when they came for their first visit. At 7pm no one had put it in the oven yet, it was still partially frozen. When I pulled it out at almost 9 the tray collapsed and the entire thing splattered to the bottom of the oven and I screamed. My husband and I were the ones who cleaned the oven a day later.
Neither my parents nor my in-laws have criticized our parenting choices explicitly, and even when it’s clear they disagree they don’t bring it up. Knowing they’re holding their tongues is so wonderful—it tells me they trust us. Once my mom and I sang “you are my sunshine” to my first born and I looked up and noticed tears streaming down her face while she grinned. My dad isn’t very mobile, so he can’t do a lot of hands-on helping, but just watching him light up around his grandkids is all I need to remind me how lucky I am.
Our first (Miriam) was born a week before her due date 10 months and 2 days after the wedding. We'd already dealt with his family's nonsense where they thought I was pregnant when we got engaged because we got engaged without a ring at first (how this translates to "she's pregnant" IDK), because we had only a five-month engagement (again, how this translates to "she's pregnant" IDK because if we WERE having a shotgun wedding, we probably wouldn't wait till the third trimester to do this?) and then his family cannot do math. No, I was not pregnant at the wedding. I didn't even get pregnant until after we returned from our honeymoon. The math maths.
So there was that. My initial thing was I wanted to hold off telling people as long as possible, preferably when the kid arrived, because it would limit the amount of crap I'd have to hear in the meantime. My husband pointed out that this probably wouldn't work, given that we'd see his mom in person over the next nine months, so we compromised and said we'd announce after we knew the sex, name, and had a baptismal date confirmed with the church (to eliminate the inter-family squabbling on both sides about all these things--you don't get a say in these matters when it's already a done deal). So we announced when I was about five months along. (NOTE: my whole family is 800 miles away, and my parents are divorced and remarried/re-partnered, and there is Drama there, so I wasn't having them come to help.)
MIL thought we were irresponsible, because we "just got married" and were "too young" (we were 36 and 34 at the time) and I didn't have a car of my own yet (I had a valid license, just hadn't owned one in years and had been using public transit for over a decade) and we were (GASP) living in a rented shotgun house (common pre-WWII house design in New Orleans--it's one room wide, however many rooms deep, no hallways, usually the kitchen is in the rear and the bathroom is added on behind the kitchen) and didn't own our own home in the suburbs. Miriam's nursery was actually the laundry/utility room (the machines were behind doors in a closet). No amount of pointing out that generations of families had lived thusly in New Orleans, and continued to live thusly, or that kids all around the world came home to homes a lot more humble than this and did not grow up "warped" would dissuade her that we were "setting her up for disadvantages."
Eventually I told her that I heard Jesus Christ was born in a barn and he seemed to have turned out OK.
So I had the baby by a scheduled C-section due to breech, and I didn't get so much as a day of maternity leave because I was teaching full-time, but online, and the other option was to take the semester off completely, which would have fucked with my health insurance among other things. MIL refused to come down (40 minutes; she lives in a commuter suburb) until the baptism 6 weeks later when her daughter would be in town and would drive her. (Note: MIL will TOTALLY drive RIGHT PAST our house to get to the airport to see said daughter, and she flew out for weeks at a time for the births of each of her daughter's kids, and her daughter had maternity leave.)
So 10 days post-op, we loaded up the baby and the baby gear and drove 40 minutes each way up to HER house to introduce her to her grandchild.
Second kid, I was 40 when I got pregnant with her and almost 41 when I had her, and it was during the pandemic. This time, my husband agreed to not tell anyone that absolutely didn't need to know until after the birth, so my parents and brother and such found out the day after. We'd by this point bought a slightly larger, non-shotgun house but still in the city, and I owned a Honda Fit, and MIL disapproved of both of those things, but whatever. We held off on telling her til I was 6 months I think?
So this time I DID have maternity leave, and I was going to have a scheduled C-section on account of already having had one of those, but I developed severe pre-eclampsia and had an emergency C-section at 37 weeks. Miriam went at the last minute to my husband's coworker overnight and husband's sister changed her flight at the last minute to come in the next day to help with Miriam, but that left a block of time between coworker needing to be at the office and his sister's flight arriving. Kids couldn't come to the hospital as visitors until the next day (due to COVID policies, which got lightened just as I was being discharged), so there was a block of time we needed to find someone to watch Miriam for. MIL grudgingly came down to watch Miriam for the day until Alex's sister could arrive, so Alex had to leave me and Vivian in the hospital (which was short-staffed, see: COVID) to go pick up the kid, take her to our house, and hand her over to his mother, who would meet him there. This was supposed to take two hours and ended up taking over four because his mom kept pestering him about the state of our lawn and the mildew growing on the side of the house and the dishes in the sink and on the table and the unfolded laundry on the bed (we had literally left in the middle of chores because I realized something was VERY, VERY WRONG and needed to go to the hospital.) Meanwhile, I had both legs tied down with anti-embolism boots, a catheter, a blood pressure cuff on one arm, a morphine and magnesium IV in the other, and I'm supposed to be taking care of a newborn and I'm falling asleep sitting up.
This time, I absolutely REFUSED to load up and take the baby to her house, but Alex wanted her to meet her grandchild, so nine days post-birth we lured her to New Orleans with ham. One of his coworkers sent a giant honeybaked ham to us, so Alex asked her to come down and help us eat it. She came in, first thing she said was "Wow, the place looks so much better than the last time I was here!", looked at the baby in the bassinet for about five seconds, and then somehow started grilling my husband about his coworker's common-law marriage's finances and why this coworker arranged her life thusly (my answer: "I don't know, and I don't ask, because neither is any of my business, but it was very nice of her and Phil to send us a ham.") This somehow then segued into a discussion of Louisiana community property law, and how that works, and my husband the lawyer and CPA actually starts discussing this with her, and she was very mad to learn that, generally, if she gave Alex money and he put it in his checking account, it would be community property. "But what if I want it to go to JUST YOU?"
Me: "You know I'm right here, right, Mrs. Burns?"
Eventually, I just went to the other room with a drink and waited til she left.
So low bar to clear, but a very important one nonetheless.
My mother-in-law teaches that grandparenting class. When our first was born, she showed up with pajama pants for me, 3 stools to make breastfeeding easier/comfier in any room, (stolen?) hospital-grade hand sanitizer for our visitors, and a diaper bag for my husband. She also bought gifts for the baby, but she saw us as people and tried to support our own needs. Love that woman.
I was pleased at the time, but every year my sense of joy at her generosity and good sense has doubled. I absolutely plan to treat my future children-in-law like she treats me.
As new parents, we didn't want/need anyone to come over and hold our baby. Holding the baby is the easy, fun part. What we needed was someone to do all the things that you can't easily do while holding a baby: laundry, vacuuming, scrubbing toilets, etc. My stepmom was everything our birth moms were not. When they came to visit for a week, she came in quietly and did it all without us even having to ask. My dad ran all the errands, brought all the food, and said things like this regularly: " [New baby] is amazing, but watching you become a mom is even more amazing." I cried a lot of happy, grateful tears that week.
I have an almost 3mo son and in the thick of this right now. My MIL visits weekly, brings her house clothes, snacks, iPad, sets up on the couch, takes the baby, and stays for half a day. She aggressively insists that my husband and I leave to go do something. She of course wants alone time with her grandson, but we never would have gone out for fun(!!) if she didn't push for it, and Saturdays have become a play day for us.
The Don't are almost comical to me because it is exactly what my MIL did in the first years after having a baby. In one memorable instance we asked her to day babysit for a weekend concert and over one evening asked I make her a v specific dinner ("But you're so good at cooking!"), asked repeatedly why I don't hire a housekeeper, and waxed poetic about how much she loved being a mother and just *couldn't bear* the thought of working (I work full time and had a weekday nanny). It got so bad we ended up having to tell her we needed a break from her "help" and didn't see her for the holidays this year. Things are mildly better now but it made the first two years so much harder than it needed to be.
On the other hand, my kinda-a-drunk and v unstable mom got on medication, stopped drinking, sends a package of baby clothes every season, and has been insanely helpful with kindness and support. She can't really watch the kid but she's become a rock for talking through issues and keeping me grounded. It's all relative I think. I'd love a babysitter grandma but instead I got my mom back and that's worth more than I can say.
I mentioned craving watermelon a few days postpartum (the breastfeeding thirst was hitting hard). My MIL went out, got me a watermelon, and chopped up the entire thing without being asked. I saw it in the fridge at my 3am pumping session and just stood at the counter shoving watermelon into my mouth; nothing has ever tasted so good in my entire life.
My mom is just the best too, always making sure to tell me how proud she is of me and that I'm such a good mom. I'll never forget the time she looked at me holding my baby and said that now I would understand how much she loved me.
My parents live an hour away, and my mom would come stay for part of the week (Weds-Sat normally) while I was on maternity leave for both babies. It was invaluable. She knew what to do to be helpful and would just do it without being asked, she took the baby at night (!!!), and if I needed something, I could just tell her what to do and she would do it without a word (unlike my husband). Love someone I can just boss around without it being weird. My husband was deep in his alcohol dependence and depression after our first was born, plus he had no experience with babies, so I honestly could not have survived that + my own PPD (plus putting our beloved dog down 2 months after birth) without her. We moved when our surprise second was 2 mos, and again, it would’ve been impossible without her. My dad on the other hand showed up completely unannounced at 9am like 4 days after I came home with my second and I was so so so mad. I had said many times that for the first 2 weeks while I had the baby blues, I basically only wanted people in my house who would not freak out if I was topless on my couch and sobbing uncontrollably, and he’s…not it.
My mother-in-law set the gold standard for helping:
She took the baby out for a stroll, rain or shine.
She brought us home-cooked meals for the whole week.
She never criticized my shortcomings (although there were plenty)!
She came and went quietly and with love for all of us.
Now I’m passing that on as a grandma.
Not that I would have done anything differently had he said the opposite, but my dad gave me the same permission to nurse in front of him, or ask him to leave the room, and it was one of those things that I didn't realize meant something until I heard and received it.
Not me over here weeping at all the kindnesses of these grandparents! We are fresh out of the thick of it (babies at 11 months and 26 months) and our families are very far away. We had help for a week at a time here and there, but not regularly. What a gift that would have been!
I had my first during Covid, so nobody could help us, which was hard. Both sets of parents dropped off food, which was helpful, but it was certainly not the postpartum experience we imagined. (And now my three year old has trouble accepting people who aren't her parents.) My MIL has, without being asked, both done dishes and fold laundry when she's babysitting and our daughter is asleep, which I always feel kind of guilty about, but she seems genuinely happy to do it.
I'm expecting another in a couple of months, and we are excited for more help this time, especially with a needy toddler. My retired parents have basically cleared their schedules for the summer since my sister and I are both expecting, but also have made it clear we can have as much or as little help as we want, which is incredibly helpful, since I sometimes find having people around stressful.
The one thing not to do--my MIL has seven kids, and there is not a single parenting experience or moment that I have either told her about or that she watched happen that she has not compared to an experience she had with one of her children. She doesn't mean it in a "do it my way" sort of way, just relationally, but I hate it. First, we have had a lot of trouble having children, so hearing about her many, many kids makes me feel bad sometimes. Also, sometimes I just want to be in the moment with my kid, rather than hearing yet another story about one of my in-laws. So just remember that you might be trying to relate by talking about when your kids were babies, but it might not be received that way by the new parents.
Great collaborating with you, Claire! <3
My mom is a handful in many ways but she is wonderful with babies/young children. She would regularly drive 90 minutes when I was on maternity leave to 'keep me company' on random weekdays. She brought food, ran errands, and was super encouraging about nursing/pumping. She also helped me pack up my apartment and move to a new house with a 3month old so I'll forgive a lot of iffy behavior for that alone. Honestly having another parent who has 'done it' and was vocal in reassuring me that I was doing a good job was all I needed for those first few hard months.
The good: my first baby came early and we were so unprepared. During my recovery and baby’s 2 weeks in NICU my parents came to our house and put together the change table, did every piece of laundry and hired someone to paint the nursery and bathroom (which had been renovated - literally texted the plumber about final steps while waiting for my c-section).
My MIL was so sympathetic about breastfeeding issues and no one has ever said anything about me whipping out my boobs to feed a baby in a shared space.
The bad: my mum could not wrap her head around having a hard time with breastfeeding. My in-laws brought a lasagne for us when they came for their first visit. At 7pm no one had put it in the oven yet, it was still partially frozen. When I pulled it out at almost 9 the tray collapsed and the entire thing splattered to the bottom of the oven and I screamed. My husband and I were the ones who cleaned the oven a day later.
Neither my parents nor my in-laws have criticized our parenting choices explicitly, and even when it’s clear they disagree they don’t bring it up. Knowing they’re holding their tongues is so wonderful—it tells me they trust us. Once my mom and I sang “you are my sunshine” to my first born and I looked up and noticed tears streaming down her face while she grinned. My dad isn’t very mobile, so he can’t do a lot of hands-on helping, but just watching him light up around his grandkids is all I need to remind me how lucky I am.
Hoo boy.
Don't be my MIL.
Our first (Miriam) was born a week before her due date 10 months and 2 days after the wedding. We'd already dealt with his family's nonsense where they thought I was pregnant when we got engaged because we got engaged without a ring at first (how this translates to "she's pregnant" IDK), because we had only a five-month engagement (again, how this translates to "she's pregnant" IDK because if we WERE having a shotgun wedding, we probably wouldn't wait till the third trimester to do this?) and then his family cannot do math. No, I was not pregnant at the wedding. I didn't even get pregnant until after we returned from our honeymoon. The math maths.
So there was that. My initial thing was I wanted to hold off telling people as long as possible, preferably when the kid arrived, because it would limit the amount of crap I'd have to hear in the meantime. My husband pointed out that this probably wouldn't work, given that we'd see his mom in person over the next nine months, so we compromised and said we'd announce after we knew the sex, name, and had a baptismal date confirmed with the church (to eliminate the inter-family squabbling on both sides about all these things--you don't get a say in these matters when it's already a done deal). So we announced when I was about five months along. (NOTE: my whole family is 800 miles away, and my parents are divorced and remarried/re-partnered, and there is Drama there, so I wasn't having them come to help.)
MIL thought we were irresponsible, because we "just got married" and were "too young" (we were 36 and 34 at the time) and I didn't have a car of my own yet (I had a valid license, just hadn't owned one in years and had been using public transit for over a decade) and we were (GASP) living in a rented shotgun house (common pre-WWII house design in New Orleans--it's one room wide, however many rooms deep, no hallways, usually the kitchen is in the rear and the bathroom is added on behind the kitchen) and didn't own our own home in the suburbs. Miriam's nursery was actually the laundry/utility room (the machines were behind doors in a closet). No amount of pointing out that generations of families had lived thusly in New Orleans, and continued to live thusly, or that kids all around the world came home to homes a lot more humble than this and did not grow up "warped" would dissuade her that we were "setting her up for disadvantages."
Eventually I told her that I heard Jesus Christ was born in a barn and he seemed to have turned out OK.
So I had the baby by a scheduled C-section due to breech, and I didn't get so much as a day of maternity leave because I was teaching full-time, but online, and the other option was to take the semester off completely, which would have fucked with my health insurance among other things. MIL refused to come down (40 minutes; she lives in a commuter suburb) until the baptism 6 weeks later when her daughter would be in town and would drive her. (Note: MIL will TOTALLY drive RIGHT PAST our house to get to the airport to see said daughter, and she flew out for weeks at a time for the births of each of her daughter's kids, and her daughter had maternity leave.)
So 10 days post-op, we loaded up the baby and the baby gear and drove 40 minutes each way up to HER house to introduce her to her grandchild.
Second kid, I was 40 when I got pregnant with her and almost 41 when I had her, and it was during the pandemic. This time, my husband agreed to not tell anyone that absolutely didn't need to know until after the birth, so my parents and brother and such found out the day after. We'd by this point bought a slightly larger, non-shotgun house but still in the city, and I owned a Honda Fit, and MIL disapproved of both of those things, but whatever. We held off on telling her til I was 6 months I think?
So this time I DID have maternity leave, and I was going to have a scheduled C-section on account of already having had one of those, but I developed severe pre-eclampsia and had an emergency C-section at 37 weeks. Miriam went at the last minute to my husband's coworker overnight and husband's sister changed her flight at the last minute to come in the next day to help with Miriam, but that left a block of time between coworker needing to be at the office and his sister's flight arriving. Kids couldn't come to the hospital as visitors until the next day (due to COVID policies, which got lightened just as I was being discharged), so there was a block of time we needed to find someone to watch Miriam for. MIL grudgingly came down to watch Miriam for the day until Alex's sister could arrive, so Alex had to leave me and Vivian in the hospital (which was short-staffed, see: COVID) to go pick up the kid, take her to our house, and hand her over to his mother, who would meet him there. This was supposed to take two hours and ended up taking over four because his mom kept pestering him about the state of our lawn and the mildew growing on the side of the house and the dishes in the sink and on the table and the unfolded laundry on the bed (we had literally left in the middle of chores because I realized something was VERY, VERY WRONG and needed to go to the hospital.) Meanwhile, I had both legs tied down with anti-embolism boots, a catheter, a blood pressure cuff on one arm, a morphine and magnesium IV in the other, and I'm supposed to be taking care of a newborn and I'm falling asleep sitting up.
This time, I absolutely REFUSED to load up and take the baby to her house, but Alex wanted her to meet her grandchild, so nine days post-birth we lured her to New Orleans with ham. One of his coworkers sent a giant honeybaked ham to us, so Alex asked her to come down and help us eat it. She came in, first thing she said was "Wow, the place looks so much better than the last time I was here!", looked at the baby in the bassinet for about five seconds, and then somehow started grilling my husband about his coworker's common-law marriage's finances and why this coworker arranged her life thusly (my answer: "I don't know, and I don't ask, because neither is any of my business, but it was very nice of her and Phil to send us a ham.") This somehow then segued into a discussion of Louisiana community property law, and how that works, and my husband the lawyer and CPA actually starts discussing this with her, and she was very mad to learn that, generally, if she gave Alex money and he put it in his checking account, it would be community property. "But what if I want it to go to JUST YOU?"
Me: "You know I'm right here, right, Mrs. Burns?"
Eventually, I just went to the other room with a drink and waited til she left.
So low bar to clear, but a very important one nonetheless.