JUSTNOMIL Original (deleted)
fuckyourcoconut 21434 G x 2 2018-01-15 20:07:30
Hello. I'm a first time poster, but I discovered this subreddit a few months ago. I was talking about this subreddit with my therapist and she gave me the homework of speaking out more about my story to see if it lessened my pain. I've written and deleted this post maybe 7 times now, but I think it's time to get it out. I've spoken English for 30 years, but it's not my first language and occasionally I use the wrong word because that's what the direct translation is, so I apologize in advance if I confuse anyone. This is going to be a long post as I'm a rambler and there is a lot of background involved.
Trigger Warning: a MIL who doesn't believe in allergies and the price I paid for it. Child Death.
This happened 12 years, 2 months, and 13 days ago on Wednesday, November 2nd, 2005. My DH got married in 2002 and had our son 10 months later in the same year. In May 2004, we welcomed our twin girls. My family was beautiful. Every time I took a picture of us, we looked like the families in the stock photos you can google for. My DH is an engineer and I'm a college professor. We had a nice house in the city. Our children were healthy and happy. We even had a golden retriever named Argo as if we weren't the picture of familial happiness as is. I can no longer look at the pictures of us because it makes me too angry to.
When my twin girls were born, we had no issues in the hospital. They were born right on their due date, latched perfectly, and passed all their postnatal tests with stellar stats. When we brought them home, however, we noticed that one of the girls, let's call her OD since she was a whole 4.5 minutes older than her sister, was developing a rash. I hadn't really dealt with allergies in kids since my son didn't have them and neither did any child or adult in my entire family. I wasn't sure what it was, I thought that maybe she just had sensitive skin like me. I can't tolerate certain fabrics because I have very dry skin and I'll often break out in rashes if my skin decides that it doesn't like something. So I stopped using fabric softener on all the clothes. I bought the nicest, most comfortable bedding and clothes. At one point, I even made her clothes myself in the fear that maybe something in the manufacturing process was upsetting my OD. We went to the doctor several times, and they knew that she was having an allergic reaction to
something, but every test came back negative and we couldn't figure out what it was. It took 3 more months to figure it out. During that time, her allergic reactions got more and more severe. At one point, she was the only baby in the history of the hospital who had to be kept in a clean room because she seemed to have a reaction the minute she left. When that happened, we began an elimination therapy that would rival the lifestyle of Buddhist monks. My husband and moved our son and YD in with his parents because we needed to eliminate everything from our routine to figure out what was causing the reaction in our OD. We stopped using our soap, our shampoo, our deodorants, our laundry detergents, and that was before we even got to our diet. It took us 3 more months, but we figured it out. Our OD was allergic to coconut. The doctors told us that it was a particularly rare allergen and so it wasn't on any of the skin test panels they ran. When we found out what she was allergic, we were relieved, so
so relived. But in addition to feeling relieved, I delved into a bought of hysterical laughter. I laughed so hard I cried and to this day, my DH tells me that he didn't know if I was crying from relief or pure happiness.
You see, I come from a culture that uses coconut almost religiously. It's in our cooking, we break a coconut open at religious events, it's used in almost all sweets, it's in everything. The reason I was laughing was because of how much I hated one particular use for coconut. When I was a kid, pretty much up until I was in the 8th class, my mother would put coconut oil in my hair all the time. It looked greasy as hell, I hated it, and once I was old enough to start doing my own hair, I never put that stuff in my hair again. I was laughing so hard because
of course I had a daughter with a severe allergy to the one thing I hated my entire life. We had a lot of fun telling people about her allergy and everyone laughed because they all knew about my hatred for coconut oil.
We told my mother and she laughed as well. She made jokes about how my baby must have heard me talking about my hatred for coconut oil while she was still cooking inside me and decided that she needed to hate it too. We all had a good laugh and left it at that.
Or so I thought.
My mother and I have always had a.... contentious relationship at best. We got along well enough, but we disagreed vehemently on certain topics. She wanted a traditional daughter who would be religious, get her MRS degree, marry a man that she and my father picked out (common where I'm from), have 2 kids, a house in the suburbs near her, and be a stay at home mom like her. I'm not religious in the slightest, I got 2 undergraduate degrees, went on to get a masters, and a PhD, didn't get married until 27 (late in my culture), and I married a man who was the polar opposite of what my parents wanted. As if this wasn't enough, I was a working mom who didn't need her to babysit since my husband and I made more than enough for a part time nanny.
Essentially, the best way I can summarize our relationship is by saying that she was very proud of me and loved to talk about my accomplishments, but I could always tell that she wished I was something else. We have a fair amount of "safe" topics that we can talk about, but I could never discuss anything too serious with her such as politics or my career. Not because she'd get mad at me, but more so because she just wasn't interested and I hate getting into conversations where I'm passionate about something, but the other person could care less.
As far as raising my kids, my mother was a JustYes 99.9% of the time. She was hands off, and respected all of my decisions, even if she didn't like them sometimes (ex: I chose not to raise my kids religiously, but I still took them to community events so they could understand their roots and my mother never pushed them to pray).
The only thing she continually got on my case about was the coconut oil thing. You see, my girls has very textured and curly hair. We don't really know where they got it from considering my husband and I have pin straight hair that won't even hold a paperclip in it without slipping. I loved it. It was a little on the rough side and my mother always insisted that a little bit of oil would make the curls soft and more defined. I always said no. Sure, we could have used a different type of oil, but my girls were still so young and the allergy process had made me terrified of incorporating new things into their routine. I made sure I explained why to my mom too. She remembered what we'd gone through with OD and her allergy. She brought me food and clothes at the hospitals more than a few times. She helped me move all of my furniture and clothes out of my house when I was eliminating every possible source of allergen. She taught me how to cook from scratch when I was eliminating certain foods from the kids' diet. She knew everything about OD's struggle. To this day I cannot understand how she did what happened next.
November 2nd, 2005:
I was giving a midterm that day to my students and I had to be at my research lab late that night. My DH was away at some conference and our nanny was down with the flu so she couldn't watch the kids that day. So I had my mom come take them for the day. My son was almost 3 years old and the girls were a year and half old. Overnight visits with my parents weren't exactly common, but they weren't unusual either. They had always come back from these visits very happy and well taken care of so I had no second thoughts about leaving them with my parents. They spoke to me on the phone after their lunch and then, around 5PM, we videochatted. The kids were all so happy and healthy. I got home around 10:30PM that night and called my mom to see if the kids were up by any chance and I could say good night. I missed the kids by about 20 minutes, they'd already gone to bed. So I talked to my mom for a little bit, but she's a pretty early sleeper too so we hung up and went to bed. I woke up around 5AM the next morning to go pick up my husband from the airport at 6. We were going to get breakfast together and then go pick up the kids. I picked up DH and neither one of us was very hungry yet, so we thought it'd be a nice treat to pick up the kids first and go to breakfast/brunch with my parents. We got to my parents' house at 7:45AM. My parents weren't there. My son was at the neighbor's house, and ran outside with the neighbor as soon as he saw his daddy and I pull up. He was hysterical and crying and I couldn't calm him down. My blood pressure was rising because now I'm thinking that something horrible had happened to my parents. My neighbor tells me that she isn't sure what's happening, but there was an ambulance at my parents' house at 6AM and my dad had run over and woken them up to see if they could watch my son for a few hours until he got back. Of course they'd said yes.
I'm calling my parents nonstop at this point and I'm getting frantic because I don't know what's happened. My son was still crying but he was calmer. He still couldn't really explain to me what had happened though. I honestly don't remember the details of what happened next, but somehow we figured out that the ambulance was from X hospital nearby and we broke several driving laws trying to get there. We got to the hospital, pulled into the emergency entrance that was for ambulances only, left the car and bolted inside. A few nurses took notice of us immediately and were asking us what was wrong. I was calmer than my DH at this point, so I explained that I didn't know, but my twin girls and my parents were here somewhere. I'll never forget the look on that nurse's face. She knew exactly who I was in that moment and she was about to cry. Another nurse took me and my DH to an empty room and asked us to calm down and listen to the doctor before we went to find my family.
My mother had put coconut oil in both my daughters' hair when they were playing the previous day before bed. The girls loved it when my mom did their hair and so they had asked for braids and my mom was doing their hair. She put coconut oil in both their hair because it would make for smoother braids. According to my son, OD started to get a little dizzy and itchy when my mom was doing her hair so my mom gave her some kids benadryl which made her sleepy. Since it was close to bedtime anyways, the kids then went to bed. Giving her benadryl was something we did whenever she had a mild reaction since it usually meant she accidentally came across some coconut from a secondary source. We also showered her from head to toe immediately to erase any lingering traces of it. My mother simply gave her some benadryl and
kept the coconut oil in her hair and put her to fucking sleep. The benadryl made her sleepy and unable to wake up or be conscious enough to wake up her brother or cry. She vomited in her sleep and the rash spread all over. Her little body was swollen to twice the size. She had asphyxiated in her sleep. She died painfully and slowly in the early hours of the morning.
My mother had found her when she went to check on the kids in the morning around 7AM. She was already dead by then. My mother screamed, called for my dad, and that's when they'd gone to the hospital. My dad hadn't known about the coconut oil until my mom explained and to this day, I've never seen my father so angry. He was still unable to look at my mother, out of fury, or me, out of shame, when I saw him at the hospital. They had rushed to the hospital hoping there was some way to save my OD and to get my YD checked out immediately since he thought she might have a mild allergy as well.
I can't even explain to you the emotions my DH and I felt. I remember seeing my little girl and just being in denial. There was no way that she was gone. This had to be a horrible, horrible nightmare. The following days, the funeral, and explaining to my other kids what had happened are events I still can't talk about because it just breaks a part of me.
My mother was investigated, as was my entire family. I almost lost my kids to my country's version of CPS once because they thought my kids were in danger. My DH and I had to fight tooth and nail to show that uprooting them during this time would be the worst thing for them at the moment.
My mother was never arrested. My father did leave her, though they're not officially divorced. The majority of my mother's family refuse to speak to her, and the few that do speak to her only do so on a limited basis. She currently lives on her own in a small town and every couple months I'll get a call from her telling me how sorry she is and how she just wasn't thinking and can I
please find a way to forgive her. She wants to come see me. The only thing I can find to ever say to her is "You can come see me when you bring my daughter with you."
It's been 13 years. OS just got his license this year and YD is going to start high school soon. Both of them are healthy and they're turning into amazing adults, but neither one has been the same since OD passed. OS is extremely protective of YS and doesn't allow anyone to breathe rudely in his presence. YS used to be so bubbly and such a talkative little child, but she's quiet now. When she does speak, it takes some effort to hear her because she's so quiet. She told me a few years ago that she knows she was only a baby when it happened, but she feels incomplete all the time, like a part of her is missing. I didn't know what to say to her.
If it weren't for my DH, I don't think I could have ever recovered from the loss of my daughter. We have helped each other through the loss.
It's taken over a decade of therapy to even get to this point. I don't know what I expect to get out of typing all of this out, but I've seen how much comfort this subreddit brings other posters, so hopefully I find some of the same peace.
Thank you for reading.