So I’ve published the first part of this story before on breastfeeding and mommit subreddits and I’ve been made feel like a monster because “mother knows best”. For the record, we are in Europe. I’m sorry for my English, and also I’m extremely emotional.
My SIL Julia gave birth to a little Amanda 11 weeks ago. From the beginning, Amanda was barely growing, mostly losing weight instead of gaining. My country is heavily pro breastfeeding and Julia decided that she wanted to breastfeed. However, Amanda wasn’t gaining weight properly and landed in 0.1 percentile for weight.
Julia forbade me and my mum from coming to visit them. She said we will poison her if we bring her food. It was surprising especially that before she gave birth, we were good friends. So we only saw little Amanda on pictures and videos my brother has been sending to us. And only once, my mum said she’s worried because Amanda looked like she’s hungry (she was crying and writhing, pushing her fists into her mouth) while Julia narrated on the video that this is how a happy baby looks like with a full belly. So my mum asked if Julia cannot give her a bottle because Amanda still seems hungry.
Julia went berserk and cut us off completely. She was pumping but her supply didn’t go up at all. Amanda had a tongue tie resolved but it didn’t help much. Julia was using donor’s milk to top up Amanda’s feeds through a sonde (I don’t know what this thing is called).
Now, every week they’re visiting a doctor’s office for a control checkup of the weight. This is where it gets really messy. They were there yesterday. And yesterday, my brother called us crying that Amanda is in the hospital.
The story went like this: As always, Julia asked my brother to bring her coffee before the weighing appointment while she’s using the nursing room to change Amanda’s nappy. As always, he did. Except this time, a nurse went in in the middle of it to ask Julia about some paperwork. And the nurse saw that Julia was feeding Amanda from a bottle right before the check up… the bottle was 150cc of milk and it was already half down. The nurse said that Julia was supposed to wait with feeding until after the checkup, and then my brother came in.
He got very mad. He said that Julia refused giving Amanda the bottles so wtf was going on. Then he took the bottle, and at the same time Amanda vomited with a very, very thick milk. Nurse went crazy and checked the bottle and it was filled with milk mixed with rice cereal.
The doctor who’s been called to see it immediately ordered moving Amanda to the hospital for an emergency check up especially after seeing Julia who went berserk and started throwing stuff around and yelling at everyone that she will be feeding her baby however and whenever she wants.
We went to the hospital to see my brother. Amanda already had her blood tests done and they showed some problems with kidneys, liver and vitamins level and iron. The doctors said she has been starving for a long time and why nobody from our family reacted. We told them the story about Julia claiming that we will poison her.
So the doctors immediately took Julia for a psych evaluation for PPD, but… turns out she was faking it. She admitted to the doctor (she was super scared that somebody might take the baby from her) that her friend told her that if she fakes PPD, we will leave her alone and she will have peace of mind during her breastfeeding.
The doctors then told her that what she did was not okay and that she was regularly stuffing the baby with milk and cereal before the weight checkup so as to pretend that Amanda grew. And that she should just give Amanda bottles with formula because this is about the little girl’s life and survival as she’s now failure to thrive and her life and health are in danger.
Julia got very mad. She yelled that she will either breastfeed Amanda or she won’t feed her at all and that the choice is only hers because this is her baby and nobody else’s.
Now this is when the doctors told Julia that either she will go for another psych evaluation or they call the police. Julia agreed for the evaluation and they locked her for a week.
My brother is working 14 hours per day because they are poor and after their wedding Julia decided she wants to be a traditional wife and he has to earn their living. So my brother said that whatever Julia is doing, it must be right. But after seeing what was happening, he got super mad. He said that she starved Amanda on purpose for her own sick satisfaction even though he was working hard on providing money so they would be able to buy formula if needed. He said he wanted divorce and full custody over Amanda. We don’t k ow if he will get it because it’s rare for dad to take care of their daughters. Also the doctors are mad at him that he didn’t notice what Julia was doing.
Before Julia went to the ward, I got angry and told her that she made monsters out of us and that we were just worried about her and Amanda. And that thos whole situation was always only about Julia and her “breastfeeding journey” and not about Amanda’s life. She called me a b*tch and said I should’ve died in childhood because nobody can love an autistic person like me.
AITA?
Comments
Amanda needed someone to speak up, and you did. Even if your words stung, they came from a place of protecting a helpless baby.
This is heartbreaking to read. Your niece’s health should always come before your SIL’s pride or desire to exclusively breastfeed. It sounds like the doctors are finally stepping in, which is good, but your brother really needs to wake up and advocate for Amanda before things get worse.
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I cannot fathom how you would even ask if YTA here.
NTA. The fact that she accused you of wanting to poison her food and cut you off makes it pretty clear she was never acting rationally. Her “breastfeed or nothing” attitude shows she cared more about control than her child’s wellbeing. It’s harsh, but your brother needs to recognize this and prioritize Amanda over trying to keep Julia happy.
I’m fuming.
I’m a survivor of a purposeful starvation as a baby by my own mother.
Your SIL is a nasty, nasty woman.
Your sister-in-law sounds like she has man housing by proxy. Her brother is doing the right thing by divorcing her and suing for full custody. She is a danger to the baby. The police need to be involved or child protective services or however, it works in that country.
NTA. Julia is very mentally ill and was willing to kill her baby to maintain some weird illusion.
She is not supposed to be a mother.
Julia needs to be in a mental institution for a while for Amanda’s health. Clearly she isn’t making rational decisions based on the best interest of her child. Your brother should document everything, get affidavits from the doctors and nurse who witnessed this behavior and onto court to get temporary custody or a restraining order or whatever the equivalents are in your country because keeping Amanda away from Julia for a while is critical. Support your brother as much as possible
fed is best when it comes to a baby. your brother may have a shot at custody bc the doctors evals and psych evals are not going to work in julia’s favor. but he will need to demonstrate that he can and will cut back his work hours.
either way amanda is not safe rn. your brother not noticing his child is hungry and julia for starving her
NTA if your SIL doesn’t have PPD she either has some other undiagnosed mental condition or she’s just straight up sadistic to purposely let her baby go hungry and suffer and obviously she knew she was hurting her baby because she was doing stuff to try and hide what was going on. Hopefully she’ll be deemed unfit and the baby can be looked after by your brother while she gets treatment for any mental health problems going on and come back and be a good mother to her baby or they’ll find she is just sadistic and strip her of her custody rights and give your brother full custody.
ESH She has done permanent damage to the baby. malnutrition is going to affect her forever. She should never be allowed near her again. Do whatever it takes to keep her safe.
When i was pregnant for my first chuld, i wanted to breast feed only.
After he was born, we noticed that i did not have enough milk for him and i had to do bottle feeding too.
I was crushed, i felt like i was failing him already, i wasn’t a good mum. I really cried…
But i never ever thought of NOT giving him the bottle he needed, no matter how devastated i was and no matter how many times i cried!
She is selfish and not fit to be a mum, except for a picture perfect mum!!!
UpdateMe!
I suppose she doesn’t realize that a baby can starve to death? Look online and find the stories. You and anyone else aware of this be cooperative with the hospital and investigators! Support your brother and help him. She doesn’t need to be around that baby! She is willing to let the baby starve!!!
Updateme!
Julia only thought she was pretending to have PPD. She has PPD leaning towards psychosis.
NTA. Please help in whatever way you can.
Wow, what an awful situation. Absolutely NTA.
NTA. Your SIL was literally starving her child to death and then filling her up with shit she can even digest properly yet so she didn’t get into trouble. She could have potentiomally given her child lifelong chronic conditions due to this. What she did was despicable. I haaaaate the superior than thou ‘breastfed is best’ army. You know what’s best, a happy baby that is thriving.
NTA but I really REALLY wish this is fake because just thinking about what that doctor said about how the baby has been starving for a long time is too sad and horrifying. OP, you should make sure your brother continues on with the divorce and pursue full custody. That baby should never be left alone with your SIL not even for a second.
Tell your brother to get an emergency hearing on this. Please. This baby cannot go back to her with her way of thinking. She knows damn well what she is doing because she tried to decive the doctor and fed a bottle to the baby.
Updateme
NTA. Julia has been risking her child’s health. I doubt she will be getting any unsupervised custody in the event of divorce. She is clearly unwell and not capable of looking after her child.
A gentle reminder that the post partum period up to a year after baby’s birth is very difficult and about 25% of new moms suffer from PPD. Instances increase when there is a history of mental health issues prior to birth.
I don’t think it sounds as though she was faking PPD. It sounds like she might have been experiencing psychosis early on which is what the paranoia could have been.
Hopefully they both get help.
NTA! I hope your brother gets sole custody after the divorce. The doctor may not call the police but he should. She should be charged with child endangerment and neglect.
Help in whatever way you can when Amanda gets out of the hospital.
This is awful. Of course you’re NTA for telling her this. In retrospect, I think you should have called CPS (or whatever equivalent in your country) before it got so far that Amanda was close to organ failure, but now you should support your brother in every way possible to keep Amanda away from your deranged SIL and keep her fed and healthy.
I hope Amanda pulls through!!!
UpdateMe!
Anything saying Y T A “mom knows best” should either not get children or be investigated by CPS – including your SIL.
That’s abuse/neglect worth reporting, Julia sounds mentally unstable to put it nicely. I don’t even want to read further, it makes me legit mad. I hope this is raigebait just because I don’t want it to be real but I know there are parents like this…
NTA at all! What is your SIL thinking! This is her baby not a toy.
My baby from day one had issues with breastfeeding including a tongue tie which was sorted. At three months she would only breastfeed at night. At five months she stopped breastfeeding completely.
She was born smaller than 0.6 percentile and I was told I need to supplement with formula as my breast supply wasn’t enough despite going to lactation consultants and pumping. Obviously I was devastated as I had breastfed firstborn till 18 months
However I care more about my baby health and when she was last weighed at six months she was between 9-25th percentile. I still express breast milk in a bottle alongside formula
Main thing healthy child
I haven’t finished reading this but i will say that’s kind of what people with ED’s do before a weigh in, drink a lot to appear to weigh more. But obviously that’s someone doing it to themselves. This is f’ed 🤯🤯🤯
I have a 5 week old baby. I wanted to exclusively breastfeed but when a few days in my baby wasn’t getting enough milk I supplemented with formula because I couldn’t bear to see my child go hungry. That’s what a real parent does, you dont mess around with your child’s health.
My aunt was like this with my older cousin. She ended up needed surgery on her rectum (or something in her butt/colon) because it seized shut or something and she’s had health issues ever since. And this was back in the 70s. So when she had her second child she still insisted on breastfeeding and mashed up bananas and fed them her son
Her doctor told her if she didn’t start supplementing with formula or using it exclusively he was calling child services. She found a different doctor who agreed that “breast is best”
You and you family need to write up every time you tried to mention to her that the baby needed formula and that she claimed you were poisoning her
You all need to band together to help support your brother so he can hopefully get fully custody. Children are not supposed to have anything but formula or breast milk until like 6 months or a year? I’ve never had kids
She may not be crazy, but she is delusional
The really sad thing is that she could have just nursed the baby first and then supplemented with formula. Baby would still be breastfeeding, but also. E getting enough to eat.
NTA. I’m so sorry. That poor baby.
Update me
NTA. Some people shouldn’t be parents and Julia is a perfect example. UpdateMe!
There was something a few years ago on the news about a woman who literally starved her baby to death because she wasn’t feeding the child properly. The baby wouldn’t latch all the time so instead of bottle feeding him she choose to let the baby slowly die of starvation. I never breast feed any of my children and they are all healthy strong individuals
“She yelled that she will either breastfeed Amanda or she won’t feed her at all and that the choice is only hers because this is her baby and nobody else’s.”
Julia should be locked up long term in the psych ward.
But to give her the benefit of the doubt, she could be suffering from postpartum depression or some kind of hormonal imbalance brought on by childbirth.
I’m going to assume there’s a child protective service in your country. If so, they should look into this. Your brother should have sensed something was wrong.
My sympathies go out to poor little Amanda. I hope she can weather the storm.
amitheangel ?
NTA. the poor baby.
Julia is the one with the problem in her head. there are maaany screws loose.
I wanted a “breastfeeding journey” as well. Someone had told me, while I was pregnant, that I should join this breastfeeding group on Facebook and I did. It was the worst decision ever bc I went into it thinking I would just immediately be one of those “I have too much milk I need to donate it etc” people. Earth mother types. Well, it was not the case at all. But this is to say- I realized this within hours of my son being born, that he was going to need more than just breast milk bc it wasn’t filling him up. I knew he was still hungry and my plan immediately went out the window. The nurses gave me formula and he clearly was needing it. A mother can tell when her baby is hungry and should do whatever they can. So knowing that your deranged SIL heard her baby hungry for 2 months and did nothing ?? Wow. Just wow.
I hope she never gets near that baby and your brother is able to raise her and stop feeling bad.
She HAD to be doing all sorts of other things to manipulate your brother as well.
I am not a dr .
Research Baron Munchausen syndrome possibly aggravated by other conditions such as borderline personality disorder or narcissistic personality disorder.
Pass research to brother .
If its legal in your country try to get him to sell the house he has for sake of moving in with his parents or sibling , maybe a cousin, to care for baby .
That might make it harder for his soon to be ex to get custody , consult legal professionals for the best way to do this.
ESH for failing the baby and also Julia. Mental health in postpartum women is a serious issue, and the adults around her should have stepped in forcefully when she was saying crazy stuff like “you’ll poison me.” There are major red flags throughout this whole story that your family and brother ignored. Maybe this is an ‘old fashioned’ patriarchal culture at play, but most Reddit users know what PPD and PPP is, so yes the blame is all around. Both mom and baby need serious help asap. Hope the little girl gets better.
Damn. That poor little baby. Baby needs to be fed whether it is formula or breast. There is no shame in feeding formula, even though some people think there is. Julia is an abusive AH.
And NTA.
NTA
The way you‘ve written things makes me think you‘re in one of the DACH countries – sorry if I‘m wrong. It‘s INSANE how big the pressure to breastfeed is around here. Literally insane. I tell every pregnant woman or new mom to stay off social media for her own wellbeing.
All the best to your niece and your brother.
NTA. This is so sad to read and I really hope that Amanda is taken care of from now on. I also hope that Julia gets better. When my son was born I felt huge pressure to breastfeed (mostly from myself). He didn’t gain weight and we had to supplement with bottles. This felt like a failure on my part and I did struggle a lot. My husband was keen for us to exclusively bottle feed because he could see the pressure that I was putting myself under wasn’t healthy, but I was sure that ‘giving up’ (as I saw it) would make me feel worse than fighting to continue. Ultimately I stuck with breastfeeding alongside bottles and it all worked out. I absolutely think that fed is best, but I do understand a little how your sister in law could have lost her grip on reality in her desperation to breastfeed. That doesn’t make her actions ok, and Amanda needs to be protected above all else. But I hope that Julia just isn’t in her right mind at the moment and that with treatment she can recover.
Maybe Munchausen syndrome by proxy? Except that normally entails people wanting attention not pushing others away. Maybe she gets the attention from the posts she makes though. Keeping people away so she can hide what she’s doing fits.
She’s mentally ill in some way if she willing to starve her child just because she “has” to breastfeed. Get that poor little child away from her however you have to do it.
I wanted to exclusively breastfeed. My body just would not make enough milk. I was heartbroken but I continued to breastfeed and pump so my baby could get some of the benefits but I also gave him formula because a healthy baby was more important than my disappointment.
Julia needs to lose all rights to Amanda. She is literally killing her own daughter over some sick psycho bullshit. There are LOTS of witnesses to what she is doing so it might be possible for your brother to get full custody. Julia needs to be allowed NO visits or only supervised visits. She’s nuts.