My husband and I have a son who is about to turn four, and we have a baby girl on the way.

As a baby, my son developed a severe allergy to diapers. He’d get awful rashes that took way too long to get better, and nothing we did helped much. Because of that, my husband and I decided to start potty training a bit early, right before he was eighteen months old. We talked to his pediatrician and relied on cloth diapers as much as we could. After a few months of that, he’d almost grown out of his allergy, but we kept going.

Today, he’s fully potty trained. He has some (very) rare accidents, but only when he tries to delay his bathroom trips for too long. When that happens, we wash him up and replace his underwear.

My husband’s mother was firmly against our decision to potty train our son early. She insisted that it would lead to IBS and that he should wear diapers until he was at least three. She tried to convince us to change our minds for months, but we held our ground.

In early December, I had a doctor’s appointment while my husband was at work, so I left our son with [Mother-In-Law] for a couple of hours. Sometime later, she called me and said [Son]’d had a (bathroom) accident. He hadn’t had one in months. I instructed her on how to proceed, as well as where to find the spare clothes I’d packed for him.

I picked [Son] up about an hour later. On our way home, he complained about being “itchy”. I didn’t know why until I got him ready for bathtime later that night. He was wearing a diaper. (It was clean.)

He didn’t get any rashes, but the diaper was a couple of sizes too small, and he hadn’t worn one in a long time, so I think that’s where the itchiness came from. When I asked him about it, he confirmed that [Mother-In-Law] had said he was “still a baby” and put him in the diaper.

When my husband and I confronted her about it, she defended herself by saying his accident was clear proof we’d made a mistake by potty training him early, and he should go back to wearing diapers for the time being. At no point did she apologize.

We decided that [Mother-In-Law] was forbidden from babysitting, as well as from spending time with our son unsupervised. She is not our only babysitting option; my mom and stepdad, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my best friend also babysit. [Mother-In-Law] didn’t think we were serious until we went to her place on Saturday. We had to go to the hospital, and rather than leaving our son with her, we took him with us.

Now that she knew we were serious, she started calling us dramatic and ungrateful, as well as claiming that we were alienating her from her grandchildren out of stubbornness. She maintained that she was right about early potty training being a bad idea and that she was only trying to help us.

I didn’t think we were in the wrong, but this did feel a bit dramatic. My brother-in-law, who was skeptical of our decision back in the day, thought we were right to be angry but it was still an overreaction to revoke [Mother-In-Law]’s permission to babysit our son.

For a while after the diaper incident, I’d been wondering where [Mother-In-Law] had gotten the diaper from. When I asked her about it, she told me it was a leftover from when my son was younger. As much as I didn’t think that was true, it did make some sense, and she swore by it. When I asked my son back in December, he just told me she had the diaper.

After I posted about it online in early January, some people reached out to me with theories about that. I talked to my husband about them, and later that week, we decided to confront [Mother-In-Law] again. We did it over the phone after our son went to bed.

This time, she decided she wanted to “come clean” — her exact words. She admitted that the diaper wasn’t a leftover, but rather a new one she bought right after [Son]’s accident.

To clarify: rather than obey my instructions and change my son into his spare clothes, [Mother-In-Law] left him alone in her bathtub while she went to the pharmacy near her house and bought diapers. She left my three-year-old alone in her house for ten whole minutes because she wanted to prove a point.

She claimed what she did was fine because the bathtub was empty and she’d locked the bathroom door. She also said [Son] was crying when she got home, and she “comforted” him by saying it would make my husband and me happy to see him in a diaper.

And then, she had the nerve to say that it was “good to get this off her chest” and that we could finally move on from this.

Needless to say, the word “outraged” doesn’t even begin to cover how we were feeling. My husband yelled at [Mother-In-Law] for over half an hour before hanging up the phone.

My husband and I talked to [Son] about it, and he said he didn’t tell us anything because he didn’t want us to be mad at him. We managed to reassure him that he’d done nothing wrong. We promised him that he’s a big boy, and he’ll never wear a diaper again.

[Mother-In-Law] called us several times over the weekend. She gave us dozens of excuses, ranging from “I couldn’t find his underwear” (I clearly remember her announcing she had it when she called me that day) to “I left my sons home alone all the time when they were younger” (my husband had no idea).

We lost whatever patience we had that day. We decided that [Mother-In-Law] won’t be allowed near our family for the next six months. If she doesn’t improve her behavior until then, that will become permanent. She’s also uninvited from [Son]’s fourth birthday party next month and won’t be allowed to see our daughter at the hospital when she’s born (I’m due in May).

We sent her a text with the above before blocking her. Even if she does change, she’ll never be allowed to babysit our kids again. We have other people who can take care of them on occasion.

The first job I ever had was working as a counselor at a riding camp at the local barn. I knew the barn owner and everyone there and would get paid in free riding lessons. Some of the kids could be difficult, but for the most part, they were easy enough to deal with.

We used to partner with a sleepaway camp; they would come once a week and we would give their kids riding lessons. It was really annoying to deal with because we also had to watch our campers who were bored and wanted to go ride. But whatever, we all understood why the deal was in place, so we did it without complaint. 

The problem ended up being the sleepaway camp’s owner’s daughter, who would come ride with the rest of the camp. This child was a literal nightmare. She would bang her doll on the stalls and scare the horses, even when we asked her to stop. She was eight and old enough to know better.

[Camp Owner’s Daughter] also thought she was way more advanced than she was. She would often not listen to the trainers in her lessons and try to make the horse canter, even though she still couldn’t walk the horse by herself. As such, we always put her on Doran, who was an older gelding and could basically teach the lesson himself. He was the only horse we could trust not to do anything when [Camp Owner’s Daughter] kicked him. She was not happy with us.

Camp Owner’s Daughter: “I don’t want to ride Doran! He’s boring! I want to ride Dorito!” 

Me: “The trainers are in charge of who rides who, so if you really want to, you could talk to them about it. Also, Doran is awesome! I love riding him!”

Camp Owner’s Daughter: “If you don’t put me on Dorito, I’ll tell my mom you hit me!”

Me: “…I’ll see what I can do.”

I was about fourteen and didn’t really know what to do, so I went and told [Barn Owner] and the trainers about what [Camp Owner’s Daughter] had said. They must have worked something out because [Camp Owner’s Daughter] did end up riding Doran and the camp was not invited back.

Related:
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 11
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 10
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 9
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 8
Some People Have Never Been Told “No” And It Shows, Part 7

When I was school-aged, my mother would drop me off at Sunday school while she attended the adult church service.

As was typical, in the weeks before Christmas, we were inundated with the story of Jesus’s birth: being born in the barn, cradled in a manger, visits from the Wise Men, the little drummer boy, etc.

Then, right after Christmas, we were taught about some of Jesus’s teachings. This led up to Easter, where Jesus was betrayed, arrested, convicted, and then executed.

One of my female classmates broke into tears when we first were taught about his execution, which was rather brutal. The teacher tried to console the girl.

Teacher: “It’s okay. This happened hundreds of years ago.”

Girl: “But he was just a baby!”

She obviously didn’t get that the narrative was covering his whole life; she thought it was happening in real time. Still, the crucifixion story is a bit graphic for elementary kids to handle.

My family acquired a big mutt mix of a dog; my mom’s coworker found him wandering the parking lot at work. The coworker couldn’t keep him, as it was big and clearly still a puppy, and he lived in an apartment. He did keep him long enough for the dog to chew up a table leg and forever earn the name Chewy!

But he knew my mom had kids, and we had a big backyard, so Chewy came to live with us.

Eventually (to my ADHD kid brain, it was a long time, but in reality, I think it was less than a year), it became clear that Chewy was too much for us. My siblings and I stopped going into the backyard because Chewy would jump on us and chase us around. He only wanted to play, but he was big to little seven-year-old me! We didn’t have the time or the money to get him trained, and without that, he was too unmanageable.

So, he went to live on a farm!

I’m not sure how my parents found them — I think it was early-days Craigslist — but a family replied. They lived on a farm and had recently lost one of their dogs. They had three boys who were all used to big dogs and knew how to train them.

They came and met Chewy, and he happily went home with his new family that same day.

Years ago, when pet shops still sell actual animals, a woman walks in with her young daughter, maybe six or seven years old. They’re looking at the litters of puppies we have in the store and the mother is cooing over them, but the daughter looks uninterested.

Me: “Are you interested in buying a puppy?” 

Mother: “Yes! My daughter needs convincing, though, so I wanted her to see how cute they all are.”

Daughter: “I want a spider! Do you sell tarantulas?” 

Mother: *To me* “You see my problem?”

Me: “Well… we don’t sell tarantulas, but we do have books on how to look after them. It might show you that there’s quite a lot of work in the upkeep of exotic pets like those.”

Mother: *To her daughter* “You see, darling? It’s a lot of work to look after a spider!”

Daughter: “But I go find the spiders in the garden shed all the time! They don’t need any looking after!”

Mother: “Fine. Let’s go and find an empty jar, and you can get your ‘pet’ from the garden, and I can save me some money!”

And she left with her daughter.