Pregnant after miscarriage and dealing w/ abusive MILFH

I’m SO sorry in advance if this is really long. I have so much to get off my chest and I’m sobbing as I write this. I posted to gauge if venting everything would be annoying and you all told me to go for it, so here it is.

So, I’ll start by saying my husbands family is extremely toxic and combative. I’ve witnessed fights between different family members in his family that are unlike anything I’ve ever witnessed. They truly enjoy fighting and my MIL admitted she enjoys the dopamine rush she gets from it. My husband has a brother in his mid-thirties who still lives at home and is an AWFUL alcoholic/drug addict and the fights I’ve seen between him and my MIL have shoved me into full blown fight or flight just witnessing them. Luckily, for the beginning of my relationship with my husband I was never involved in the fights….until recently.

In November of 2023 I found out I was pregnant and was extremely excited. During the early parts of that pregnancy I was extremely sick and MIL would make snide comments about how she never got sick and how she went on a two week cycling trip pregnant. Just comments to put me in my place it seemed. Anyway, at what would’ve been 16 weeks we went in for our second ultrasound and found out we’d had a missed miscarriage several weeks prior, right after our previous ultrasound, and I needed a DNC. on our way to hospital we call my MIL to update her and she was incredibly cold towards me. I was SOBBING and inconsolable and she never once offered me a shred of kindness. All she said was that “it didn’t add up”. After going through the DNC that’s what she’d repeat over and over. “That just didn’t add up. Miscarriages are soooo obvious. You’d be bleeding so much you would’ve had to call an ambulance” or things like “I’ve told everyone your story doesn’t make sense to me and I know there’s a lot you’re not telling me. You must’ve had some hand in this and it’s so unfair to my son and our family”. Which just made me feel so guilty and full of shame because I so desperately wanted that baby and thought I did everything right. I felt humiliated whenever I’d be around anyone I knew she might have talked to, felt like they were thinking horrible things about me and my loss. So I pulled back completely and stopped sharing.

Flash forward to October of 2024, I find out I’m pregnant again. We are SO excited but hesitant due to the trauma of our previous loss. So we decided to not share with anyone until we had enough confirmation to breathe easier. I did tell my mom though. She is a nurse practitioner and I needed her guidance and support throughout those first several weeks and felt it was my right to tell who I felt comfortable telling. We ended up finding out we are pregnant with twins at our second ultrasound and we were so ecstatic. We just wanted to share our joy with everyone so we decided it was a good time to let everyone know. At the very end of November/beginning of December we told his parents. We did this with the boundary that we wouldn’t be sharing every intimate detail of the journey health wise and we just wanted them to get excited and when we had any news we felt ready to share we’d share it. We did this because my MIL is incredibly pushy for very personal information and needs to have the upper hand and control on every situation. Dealing with this just wasn’t an option for me after experiencing my loss and now dealing with a high risk twin pregnancy with a lot of additional health issues in conjunction with being pregnant. I just don’t have it in me to please her every whim.

Around Christmas I was put on strict bedrest for a few weeks due to massive issues with my kidneys. I needed the rest and I wasn’t putting on any weight so they instructed me to eat anything and everything I could. So over Christmas I was chilling, eating, and keeping stress down. Honestly, it was kind of awesome but once my MIL caught wind of this she came over unannounced to tell me exactly what she thought.

She uses this super condescending tone that is punctuated by a patronizing giggle. It’s almost a tick for her. She sits down and goes “so how are you doing? I’ve heard you’ve gotten yourself bedridden? How does that all work? Doesn’t make sense to me to need to laze around because of your kidneys? I just want to know how that all works. I feel like I deserve this information because they are MY grandsons and I have very strong opinions about how you should be handling pregnancy. It’s not a medical condition after all”. Maybe call it pregnancy hormones but I was immediately seeing red. The way she said everything was so arrogant and belittling and I just wasn’t going to sit there and have her tell me I was just being lazy. So I said “I appreciate your concern but I’m working with and listening to my doctors and my medical care isn’t any of your business. You can choose to be supportive or you can choose to pull back, but those are your only options. There isn’t an option to dictate my medical treatment or strong arm information out of me”. Then I told my husband i loved him but I needed to remove myself from the situation. And I walked away.

My husband and his mom ended up talking for about 5 minutes and then he asked her to leave. He came into our room and told me she said some terrible things about me and he kicked her out and told her we needed a break from contact for awhile so I could focus on staying healthy for me and my babies, and that stress wasn’t good for any of us. So we kept things very very surface level up until Monday when I texted everyone asking them to come for dinner on sunday (what would’ve been tomorrow) for my husbands birthday dinner. His mom texted back saying she wanted to come over to “break the ice” before the dinner and talk everything out. I told my husband it wasn’t a great idea but he said he’d give her strict boundaries and we’d see how it went. So yesterday she came over.

When she arrived I was in the bathroom doing my skincare routine and listening to a podcast so I didn’t hear her come in. When I came out to the living room I saw she was here and I said hi and she said “haha hi” with that same giggle that basically says she thinks you’re beneath her. I immediately felt my heart rate spike because I could sense from just her energy that she wasn’t here for a calm kind conversation, she wanted a fight. I walked into the kitchen and grabbed a glass of water. I stood in there for what felt like an eternity gathering myself and calling upon all my strength to handle the situation that was about to unfold with grace(I did not lol).

I walked into the living room and sat down on the couch next to my husband with her in a chair across from us. She immediately goes “I wanted to talk to get all the information on the table so I know what’s going on. None of this ‘just take what you get’ business. I want everything. I’m a scientific analytical person, I’m not all emotional like you, and I need information or you don’t get me in your lives anymore”. My jaw DROPS that she was creating an ultimatum to manipulate me into crossing my very clear boundaries and I wasn’t having it. I respond and tell her that I am under no obligation to tell her my medical information. We’re happy to share ultrasound pictures and talk about exciting things but she will not dictate my healthcare or my delivery. She then goes on a long rant about how she tried to be welcoming to me and I’m punishing her for being “analytical” about my miscarriage, then goes “and while we’re on that topic, you’ve provided so little information about your current pregnancy and in combination with the lies surrounding your miscarriage how am I to know you are even pregnant?”. For the record, she has an album of ultrasound pictures and videos; not to mention my belly is HUGE, like I don’t owe her anything else. I don’t feel safe sharing with her and I’m not willing to because I don’t know how she’ll manipulate. You can’t give her an inch. And she’s just trying to delegitimize me to be cruel, to gaslight me and my experience. Use it as a way to emotionally persuade me into “proving” myself. And I won’t feed into her games. But she continues on and on about how she needs all the information to offer her support and feels I haven’t offered enough. I just sit there letting her dig herself into a massive hole and create a situation of her own making. She then goes on and on about how my husband stooped to my level and he’s way out of my league. She’s the quintessential 90’s almond mom and if you’re not trying to achieve a 0% body fat physique with the lowest weight you can manage, you’re fat and disgusting. She’s very uncomfortable with me being 175lbs and curvy, and it’s always been a sticking point for her. So me needing to bedrest or eat extra or focus on things other than my appearance, she interprets as just fat people laziness. She then continues on about how it’s unfair I plan to have my mom at the birth and not her. And if we want reconciliation she thinks a good place to start is letting her come to the birth. She then polishes off by saying “I think you have a mental derangement that says you’re ill because you’re pregnant but you just want an excuse to lay around”. At that point I’ve had enough and I get up to walk away but under my breath I go “I’m not going to sit here and take this from a nasty woman. Nasty nasty woman”. In hindsight I know I should not have said this and it just completely escalated the situation and set her on fire. I regret saying it at all but I just couldn’t take her berating me anymore.

She now EXPLODES as I’m walking away. Comes chasing after me SCREAMING “HOW DARE YOU, YOU WITCH OF A GIRL. HOW DARE YOU!! YOU ARE NOTHING. YOU DISGUST ME. YOURE JUST A CUNT WHO HAS MY SON UNDER HIS SPELL” my husband then tells her she needs to leave and we won’t tolerate this behaviour in our home but she doubles down with “I DESERVE TO STAND UP FOR MYSELF. SHE IS A BULLY AND JUST SAID HORRIBLE THINGS ABOUT ME AND YOURE JUST ALLOWING IT!” My husband tells her she is not welcome in our home if she is going to behave like this and as she’s putting her shoes on she goes “you’ve made your choice, son. You chose that cow and you lost your family. Good luck”.

I was left sick about this. I was shaking uncontrollably and vomiting in reaction to the stress and anxiety I felt in that moment. I’m just feeling so guilty. I feel like my husband has lost his family because I couldn’t keep my mouth shut and take the high road. I just don’t know where to go from here and how to reconcile what we experienced. if you have any advice PLEASE share. I’m in desperate need of any insight you may be able to provide. I’ll stop writing now because this is actually a novel. But please guide me 😭💕