I told my mother-in-law not to give my daughter fruit from the garden. She didn’t listen, so I’m just not lending her the little one anymore

I told my mother-in-law not to give my daughter fruit from the garden. She didn’t listen, so I simply won’t let her babysit anymore. At first glance, it looks like just another petty spat between a daughter-in-law and her mother-in-law, right? But sometimes there can be more serious reasons behind seemingly trivial situations. In this case, it was a health issue.

To explain—my daughter has allergies. The situation was worst when she was in preschool. On top of her birch allergy, she developed a cross-reaction to apples (and also to celery, but that wasn’t such a big deal since she only had a problem with it raw). And that was a problem.

Don’t even get me started on their gardening achievements

My mother-in-law and father-in-law were proud of what they grew in their little garden. They had an apple tree, a pear tree, a few currant bushes, a patch of beans (for themselves), and peas (for the grandchildren and for their Shih Tzu dogs, who could literally eat their fill of them). And it was with that apple tree that the problem began.

Beautiful apples, but my daughter couldn’t eat them

The apples were beautiful—no doubt about that. And they kept well in the cellar, too. But at that time, my daughter simply couldn’t eat them at all. Later, we managed to reintroduce them into her diet (through heirloom varieties and eating them without the skin in small portions), but at preschool, it was unthinkable. Paradoxically, however, her teachers—and especially my mother-in-law—had no problem with it.

Photo: Pixabay

It took a lot of work to convince her. I had to persuade her for a really long time that those apples really weren’t a good idea. And that even washing them ten times, washing them down with milk, or disinfecting them with a drop of plum brandy (for my daughter, of course), as she suggested, wouldn’t help.

But in the end, we managed to sort it out, and my daughter didn’t taste the last winter apples from the cellar. Hooray! But then spring and summer came…

My daughter started coming home covered in a rash

And suddenly it was happening again. My daughter started coming back from her grandmother’s with a flare-up of eczema and breathing difficulties.
I tried to figure out if there was a winter apple hidden somewhere that had ended up in her diet. But apparently not. My mother-in-law swore to it. And then I figured it out. I saw my father-in-law spraying the currants against aphids in the morning. It was some kind of chemical concoction, not an organic product.

And by the afternoon, he was already picking the currants and bringing them to eat. That was the root of the problem! No waiting period before consumption—apparently, that’s only listed on the packaging to protect the manufacturers.

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“We always do it this way and no one has ever had a problem,” said my mother-in-law.

It didn’t bother the adults, but my hypersensitive daughter ended up with eczema. I tried to reason with them nicely. And that was a big mistake.

“You made up that apple thing just to make things difficult for us. There’s no such allergy. The neighbor’s son is also an asthmatic, and he can eat apples just fine.”

That’s pretty much how my mother-in-law snapped at me. And that was the last straw.

Since then, I haven’t let my little one stay with my mother-in-law

My daughter never stayed over the weekend or unsupervised at her house again. She wasn’t allowed to eat fruit from the garden—instead, I always brought her my own, bought at farmers’ markets. Surprisingly, she didn’t break out after eating it—so they probably used chemicals more sparingly there. (It was just the price, but what wouldn’t I do for her?). In the end, we completely cut ties with my in-laws. But that’s a whole other story.

Still, I can’t wrap my head around it to this day—you can see you’re hurting a child, and you keep doing it anyway? Was that on their part deliberate, complete ignorance, or what? Have you ever experienced anything similar?

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Featured image: Pixabay