Venting anonymously because I know my hormones are out of whack so this might actually be petty and I’m just too emotional to realize it, but— My and my husband’s first child is due in less than 2 weeks. My mother-in-law has known since March that she needed a preventative double mastectomy (and reconstruction done at the same time). She put it off and did not have it done until last week. Her reasoning as she said multiple times is because she wanted her healing time to coincide with when our baby is born. I am so frustrated by this. My mom is not in the picture, and I have no sisters or aunts around. I think it was selfish of her to wait until this time. Her healing will take at minimum 6-8 weeks, which means I am without motherly/womanly support in these last weeks leading up to birth and the month afterwards. Instead of spending the last few weeks prepping ourselves, my husband and I have been cooking for my in-laws, taking care of their pets while she was in the hospital for almost a week, and using the last of our days off together to go sit with them while she’s healing at home. I find this extremely inconsiderate. This should be a time when my husband and I are focusing on ourselves and our family as it changes. Half the food I meal-prepped for us for the first month after baby was given to his parents. Neither one of them is asking if we need anything (not that they could help now even if we did). Not to mention, now his mom will be going back and forth to a hospital for follow ups during flu season and then wanting to be around our newborn. This also means she can’t get the flu shot, TDAP shot, or shingles vaccine for who knows how long. Plus I’m not even sure she’ll be able to be out and about (due to drains and discomfort) for a while and I am not going to be loading up my newborn constantly to drive 25 min to their house. Ugh the timing has seriously given me some major resentment towards her. She didn’t tell us about the surgery until July, which was also when my baby shower was that did not go as planned... so there was no time to talk to her about it being bad timing. Thanks for sticking it out if you read this far into this mama’s vent session

*EDIT: just wanted to emphasize the fact that my mother-in-law could have gotten this surgery in March, April, May, June, or July. She CHOSE to wait until the last week in August to purposefully coincide with my delivery. Also, it was preventative in nature.