I can’t help but judge my twenty-year-old daughter for what she is doing to her young family and her daughter. She had been dating Adam since she was fifteen, couldn’t wait until her eighteenth birthday to get married. The wedding was followed by a move to a rented apartment where the young couple could live on their own. They lived meagerly at first, since they were both just starting university and their part-time jobs were as waiters and store clerks, but in their twentieth year Adam got a job as an assistant realtor and started making more money. That same year they found out they were expecting a baby.
My daughter went around bragging that she would soon be a young mother, that she would be the best parent ever. Finances for once allowed them to set up more or less a nursery, buying a crib, stroller, and some baby stuff ahead of time. Her daughter attended pregnancy classes, ate right, did not deny herself anything, and Adam surrounded her with care. Still, she was terribly afraid of childbirth and the responsibility that would follow. She shared her worries only with me, afraid to appear weak to her husband and mother-in-law, and I encouraged her in every way I could, assuring her that she would cope with everything. But she didn’t.
The labor was hard, she suffered a lot and could not give birth for 24 hours, and then she lay in the maternity hospital with the baby for another week. After she was discharged, she handed her daughter to Adam and said she wasn’t ready to be a mother yet. She put the baby with her husband and mother-in-law, and she came home to me and her father.
We tried to talk some sense into her at first, but she wouldn’t go back to the family. Adam came and begged her to be a good mother, because his family would help them with everything. I only saw my granddaughter thanks to my son-in-law. This went on for more than half a year, until my daughter realized her mistake, realized that she missed Adam and the baby, and went back to ask for them.
Adam and her mother-in-law accepted her right away, but there is this coldness between them all the time. The daughter says she feels her husband’s family judging her for not thinking about the baby for six months after she gave birth, and then she suddenly fell very much in love with her daughter and tries to play happy family, as if the gap of seven months between them had not happened. And I understand them. I’m mad at my daughter myself, and I pray that she and Adam will get along and get over this resentment. But is it possible? She did such an ugly thing by leaving them, after all.
