Mom finds out MIL told bio son he's 'more loved' than adopted sister, big fight ensues.

People have a lot of strange and intense feelings around child-bearing and adoption. Some people are deeply attached to the idea of a biological child, and sometimes claim adoption doesn't feel the same emotionally.

Others believe having a bio child is irresponsible when there are already so many kids who need a home. There are lots of nuances and middle grounds, of course, but these are two of the attitudes on the extremes, and when these extremes but heads it can get very heated.

In a popular post on the AITA subreddit, a woman asked if she's wrong for cutting her mother-in-law off from her kids.

She wrote:

AITA for telling my mother-in-law that she's not allowed to meet our kids anymore?

My husband and I have two (5F) and (8M) children. After a very traumatic birth with my elder one I decided that I'm not ready to go through that again. But we still wanted more children. So five years ago we adopted. My mother-in-law cares for our family. But she makes her preference for Malcolm is more than clear.

To begin she was absolutely furious hearing that I would not be having another biological child and was instantly disapproving. After hearing we were going to adopt a child her anger turned into rage. She screamed about how we didn't know the parentage of the child and might end up bringing in someone who would disgrace her lineage. My husband was able to calm her down.

Thankfully when she saw little Julia it seemed like this was all behind us. Yesterday MIL decided to visit us, my husband was away on a trip so she was just helping around. I was absolutely exhausted so I asked if I could go down for a nap and she was more than agreeing.

After a few hours, she woke me up and informed me that she was about to leave. All was good, I was cooking in the kitchen and all of a sudden I hear a loud bang proceeded with a crying Julia, when I rush into the hall I see Malcom towering over her. 'You're not real! All of this is mine!' He started screaming. Which was incredibly confusing, to say the least

After calming them down I asked Malcom what he meant. He then revealed that grandma Muriel had told him that he was 'mommy and daddy's real son' this made me incredibly mad.

I asked him what else grandma had told him and he told me all about how she had been telling him that Julia wasn't really his sister and how he should be extra attention for being 'extra special', how he's always going to be grandma's favourite grandson, and so much more.

Blinded with rage, I blocked Muriel on everything after sending her a text detailing her actions and how this was absolutely unacceptable, and how she'd never be seeing her grandkids until they're much older and understand the situation so they wouldn't be swayed by her words. I probably overreacted to be fair, she is quite an old lady.

After he returned we got into quite the argument, to say the least, my husband disagreed. He adores his mother and told me that stopping her from seeing the kids is inhumane, she's simply old-fashioned and she didn't know her words would bring this big of an impact or some such. We will be having a civil discussion about this later.

Edit: I'm sorry I didn't clarify this earlier but both Julia and Malcom know that she is adopted. I've had the conversation with both the children, although i have had it separately with the both of them. I think I might have to have this conversation once again and make sure Julia knows that it doesn't matter whether she's adopted or not.

This post inspired a lot of discussion.

No-Importance-659 wrote:

I need you to understand this: Your husband is saying he will let his mother abuse your daughter. You have a serious problem in your family and you need to get into counseling to fix it immediately, before he ruins this young girl's life. And you need to prepare for the fact that your husband may never really love or protect his adopted daughter, and you will have to be the one who protects her from both of them. NTA.

shadow-foxe wrote:

NTA- um wow. adoption has been around for centuries and is not a new concept so her age has nothing to do with this. Seems your husband feels the same way to some degree or is very blinded to how harmful the MIL words are to both children. And yes she knew exactly what her words would do or else she'd not be saying them.

Rredhead926 wrote:

What's 'inhumane' is the way your MIL treated your daughter. If your husband can't understand that, he has no business being a parent at all. You need to protect your daughter and make sure that both she and your son understand that they are 'real' family.

You may want to look into finding an adoption-competent therapist to undo the damage your MIL has done, and to make sure that Julia feels secure in her family. NTA.

Rainbow62993 wrote:

NTA. Your husband needs to stand up to his mother. 'She's just old fashioned' is a stupid excuse to ignore someone's ignorance. She might be a 'lil old lady', but that means she has the knowledge to understand what is and isn't acceptable at this point in her life. No excuses for any of this. If she can't treat all of your children equally, then she can lose her right to see any of them at all.

Clearly, OP is in the right and her husband needs to seriously stand up to his mom.