Hi!
I'm looking for anyone around my age that might want to be friends?
I'm trying to put together a small server in Discord of people that regularly play games, that don't necessarily want to play together but just want to hang out and be social. Making friends is hard these days, right?
I'm a bit quirky, so the weirder you are, the better! (PC gamers)
Hi,
I'm 5 months out from the neonatal death of my son, my first child after 9 years of an infertility battle.
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Since my son was born and in NICU, I joined the NICU parents reddit page, and all I see recently is parents complaining and I'm just thinking "DO YOU EVEN KNOW HOW LUCKY YOU ARE?!".
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I saw a post today of a lady whos baby was born at the same gestation as mine (premature), but her baby survived and she was complaining about how one of the nurses on NICU congratulated her because it was her due date and how she stayed in bed not knowing how to handle it because she was "grieving what should have been".
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Does she even know how lucky she is? I hugged a box of my sons ashes on my sons due date but her baby is alive and well and she's complaining about a damn nurse saying "happy due date". I told her "grieving what should have been is far worse when your child is dead".
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I just have this anger in me that I never used to have. I've turned so bitter towards people who whine about trivial stuff now or those that find fault in everything. I guess in my mind, my child died, it doesn't get worse than that.
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Anyone else like this? Is it just a phase? Will it pass? I don't want to be this way.
What would you do in this situation?
In January 2026, my husband and I welcomed our son at 26 weeks gestation via emergency c-section. He was our first baby after 9 years of trying to conceive, as both my husband and I struggle with fertility issues.
Everything happened extremely suddenly and traumatically. I became very unwell with sepsis, our son was critically ill at birth, and we were told he had severe neonatal sepsis and pulmonary hypertension. He lived for just under 6 hours before he died in our arms.
My mother-in-law was there at the hospital. She met him, held him while he was alive, and was present after he passed away.
At first, we thought she was supportive. But over the months since losing our son, we’ve started reflecting on a lot of the things she said and did, and honestly, it’s left both of us deeply disturbed.
For context: on the same day as our son’s funeral, my sister-in-law also lost a baby at 16 weeks gestation.
When my mother-in-law found out that my sister-in-law had been able to hold and meet her baby, she said: “Why would the hospital let her do that? Is it like when a puppy dies and you show it to the mum so they know it’s dead?”
She repeatedly referred to my sister-in-law’s baby as “not a real baby” and “just a foetus,” and said she didn’t understand why she would have PTSD, grief, or “aching arms.” When my sister-in-law arranged a funeral for her daughter, my mother-in-law called it “stupid” and questioned why anyone would have a funeral for a baby at that gestation.
She also has an issue with my sister-in-law talking to her living child about the baby they lost. Because of that, I can’t help but feel like she believes bereaved parents should eventually just stop talking about their babies altogether and pretend they never existed. It makes me genuinely worried that if we ever have future children, she would expect us to hide our son’s existence from them too, almost like he should be swept under the carpet and forgotten. This would absolutely never happen but she has made comments about my sister-in-law having a memorial shelf for her miscarried baby at her home, saying things like my sister-in-law is doing it for "attention".
What makes this harder is that she has also referred to our own son as a miscarriage, despite the fact he was born alive and died in our arms hours later.
At the hospital, literally while our son’s body was lying beside us in a cold cot only hours after he died, she started talking about us having a “rainbow baby.” I know some people mean well when they say things like that, but at that moment it felt incredibly insensitive and dismissive of the child we had just lost.
She has also compared the death of our son to an abortion she had when she was younger. For years she described it herself as an abortion because she didn’t want the baby, but after our son died she suddenly started referring to it as a miscarriage and using it as a comparison to our loss. I honestly find that deeply hurtful. Losing a baby who was wanted, carried, born alive, and died in your arms feels completely different to us.
My husband has been struggling severely since our son died. He has PTSD and nearly lost both his wife and child in the same day. Occupational health and counsellors have said he is not ready to return to work and is currently a risk to himself mentally, but my mother-in-law constantly pressures him to “just go back to work.”
Another thing that really upset me happened after I decided to start a small memorial business in our son’s memory. I create funeral stationery and memorial items for babies and children because I struggled to find anything suitable when planning my own son’s funeral. Part of the reason I do it is because I wanted something meaningful to come from his life, and I also donate toward baby loss charities that supported us.
After hearing this, my mother-in-law decided she wanted to start selling her own artwork at her local pub. She said she would put up a story about our son beside her paintings because “everyone loves a sob story.”
That comment honestly made me feel sick. It felt like she was trying to use our son’s death as a marketing strategy.
There have been lots of other comments too, including her trying to tell us that we “can’t” post about our son’s death on social media. We wouldn’t have posted it publicly anyway because we are very private people and rarely use social media, but the fact she thought she had the right to control how we grieve or speak about our own child felt incredibly invasive and upsetting.
At this point, both my husband and I are seriously considering distancing ourselves from her or removing her from our lives entirely. I think I just need validation from people outside the situation, especially other bereaved parents, because sometimes I feel like I’m going crazy hearing these things.
Would you consider this behaviour unacceptable? How would you handle this?