The Diaper’s Not The Thing That’s Full Of Crap
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.