It was in the dark of night. My 10-month-old was crying in his crib. “Don’t get him,” I told my wife. She listened. I’m not afraid of crying babies. If I always focused on stopping the crying, I would never find out what my son was crying for in the first place. This crying was emotional. A night terror? He needed someone to hold him. I walked over to the crib and picked him up. I walked out of the room and was immediately met by my mother-in-law.
“What’s wrong with him?” she asked, reaching out to take him from me.
“Nothing. He’s fine,” I answered, keeping him in my arms.
“Maybe it’s an earache,” she followed.
“His ears are fine,” I answered, heading downstairs.
“Pedro had an earache when he was a baby, he kept touching his ears…”
“It’s not an earache. I’ve been watching him. His ears are fine,” I replied.
“Here, give him to me,” she insisted.
“Mom, if you keep following me, I’m going to head outside in the cold night. I explained to you already, he’s okay. He’s my son, I’ll take care of it.”
That’s what started the war. From that day forward my mother-in-law, Abuela, was no longer my greatest ally in helping me raise my son. She made me her enemy.
I didn’t understand she was fighting me right away. I simply noticed a few changes in how she interacted with the baby. She made smiley-faces and come-to-me gestures to my son from behind my back. She used to play with him directly. Now she was sneakily calling him over when I wasn’t looking. When I did notice her, she would act like she was doing something else.
Why the change? Did I do something wrong? I asked my wife if I might have offended her. “I warned you about my mom,” she told me. That’s true. She did. Before we were even married, she warned me that her mom was not the innocent old woman she made herself out to be, but I figured most children say that about their parents. My wife only warned me because she knew that I really loved her mom and, as a writer, I loved her stories.
Abuela is the oldest of eight children, raised in El Salvador. The term “raised” is questionable. He father was an alcoholic who had children with other women and her mother suffered from sickness and emotional breakdowns, leaving Abuela to stand in as mother to her siblings. Her younger siblings called her mom. “I always had to correct them,” she told me. After raising her own siblings in El Salvador, she came to the United States to raise six children of her own. Abuela’s first action against me in this war was doing her best to turn all of these people against me. It worked.
I found out soon after what my mother-in-law wanted from all of this. She wanted my son. She wanted me to surrender my son over to her because she was the matriarch of the family, because she believed women should be raising babies instead of men, and basically because she wanted to be called mommy again. This was something I was not willing to do.
Raising my own child was my lifelong dream. In high school, there were plenty of teens who dreamt of being rich and famous. I dreamt about having my own family. It’s all I ever wanted. Maybe it’s because I came from a family of abuse and alcoholism. I tried my damndest to make drastic changes to my own life, so that I would not bring pain and suffering to my own wife and children one day. Building a functional family meant everything to me.
All of the research in the world couldn’t prepare me for fatherhood. After my wife gave birth to our son, I went through paternal postpartum depression (yes, there is such a thing). It was frightening, but I picked myself up, committed my life to my son, and was born anew as The Legendary Daddy. I recovered. I was enjoying my responsibility as a stay-at-home dad, and now my mother-in-law wanted me to give up my son to her out of respect.
Should I fight back? Should I raise the white flag? I needed to assess my situation. We lived in their home. For that reason, some people believed I had to surrender. I did not. Taking responsibility for my child was not an offensive tactic. I recognized that Abuela was helpful in caring for the baby, but I also recognized that she had no problem making our living situation a living hell the moment I was no longer in her good graces. She had no problem upsetting the baby to get her way. This was the emotional manipulation my wife had warned me about. Now, that manipulation was hurting my son.
I had to make choices with my son’s well-being in mind. I was the main provider for my son. I did the feedings, the bathing, the diaper changes. I would be his provider in the future. I was the one with whom he was going to need that parental bond. I would be there when he had his first heartbreak. I would be there when he had his first fight. I would be in the principal’s office when he was in trouble. What kind of Legendary Daddy would I be if I told the principal, “Well, I’m sorry my son is behaving this way. You see, he has this grandmother…” No way. We were going to war and I was going to win. For him.
The war lasted three months. A woman who runs a household has many tactics, but the main one is her voice. She told anyone who would listen that I was abusive. She told family, “I’m not allowed to even look at my grandson.” People listened, but they didn’t buy it. It was hard for Abuela to portray a believable victim when everyone knows that she is one of the toughest women on the planet.
My father-in-law is very much like my wife. He couldn’t stand Abuela’s constant manipulation. He knew what she was doing and he tried to stop her. Finally, he grew frustrated enough to yell at me. That hurt pretty bad. I cried a little, but I didn’t surrender my son. I had to be the rock and foundation from which my son would grow. I surrounded him with love during these battles. Against Abuela’s desires, he only grew closer to me.
The war truly ended the day my in-laws went after their daughter, my wife. She had just arrived home from work, while I was leaving with our son. I told her I would call her from the car. Her parents decided to confront her immediately after I left. She was wearing her bluetooth earpiece when she answered, so her parents didn’t know that we had an open line of communication where I could hear everything they were saying.
“You married a bad man.”
“He doesn’t even have a job.”
“What kind of a man has his wife go to work, while he stays home and raises the baby.”
“He’s lazy. That’s why he’s home. That’s why he doesn’t work.”
I heard it all. What’s most important is that I heard wife’s reaction: “We are not you guys. We’re not raising our son the way you raised us. I have no problem with my husband raising our son. He does a great job and I support him.”
That was the day the war ended. They no longer had control over their little girl. Their daughter had dedicated her life to her husband and her son. “And it was so weird,” my wife would tell me later. “When I said all of that to them, it was true. I really felt it.” God bless my wife. I couldn’t have done it without her.
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