The clock is ticking for me to buy Christmas gifts, but I still have a little bit of time before Santa beats me to it. Next year, I should be more like Redditor Jester_Mellow, who had already bought and wrapped everything she needed in advance.

However, in a post on the subreddit ‘Just no MIL,’ the woman said that her mother-in-law had seriously interrupted her preparation. Apparently, the lady tried to secretly go through everyone’s presents while they were happily sitting and waiting for the recipients.

Jester_Mellow’s emotional description of the situation serves as a reminder of just how important it is to respect people’s boundaries, especially during the holiday season when stress can be heightened even more than usual.

Seeing people you love open the presents that you got specifically for them is an incredibly rewarding experience

Image credits: freestocks / unsplash (not the actual photo)

But this woman suspects that her mother-in-law went through her family’s gifts before they had the chance to unwrap them

Image credits: AboutImages / envato (not the actual photo)

Image credits: Kari Shea / unsplash (not the actual photo)

Image credits: jester_mellow

We managed to get in touch with Jester_Mellow, and she agreed to have a chat with us about her mother-in-law and the whole Christmas present ordeal.

“I first met her last year prior to being engaged,” the Redditor told Bored Panda. “We have spent a lot of very personal time together. I am Hispanic and Christian, and she is a Muslim woman from Bangladesh.”

“She was the youngest of 10 siblings who all got married and had kids before she turned 18. They sent her to college, and when she finished her degree, they arranged for her to be married to a college boy who promised to take care of her as her brothers did. In Bangladesh, she was a princess. She wanted nothing. She had a private security team of older brothers who attended to her every need.”

However, things suddenly changed. “Her new husband took her across the sea to America, where she knew nobody, and she spent the next 30 years miserably married to him.”

Jester_Mellow had spent the year telling her mother-in-law that she needed to leave her husband, and she eventually did, “ending 30 years of cheating, lying, and backstabbing one another.”

“My fiancé and I moved in per her request to help support her financially. It’s a big house with a heavy mortgage, and her husband left her in debt,” the author of the Reddit post continued, explaining how they got to this point.

“So, her daughter-in-law (me) brought home a small stash of packages and left them wrapped on the dining room table. I’m not sure exactly what her thoughts were, but I’m sure a lot of it was fear and entitlement to a perceived secret.”

After she noticed the presents had been taken apart, Jester_Mellow texted her mother-in-law, but she denied everything and blamed her brother-in-law. “After talking to him, it’s pretty obvious to me that she has some deep issues that have nothing to do with me and more to do with her recent divorce.”

“She just simply could not have a secret in the house she wasn’t privy to and was too embarrassed and ashamed to fess up… She has trust issues [and] she regularly accuses friends and family of cheating on their spouses, and it has gotten to truly cartoon levels of irrational fear,” the Redditor added.

So far, Jester_Mellow hasn’t updated her post, and she doesn’t really plan to. “I chose to walk away from my original post because simply, it’s sad. It’s such a truly childish thing for her to do, and I have talked to my own family about it, and they encouraged me to live and let live. Christmas is also very religious for me. And I prayed to God about it a lot and put it in His hands at this point.”

Many women report tension in their relationship with their mother-in-law

Image credits:  Aiony Haust / unsplash (not the actual photo)

While not all of them are as infuriating, disagreements with mothers-in-law are quite common.

A recent study published in the Evolutionary Psychological Science journal showed that both men and women report having more conflict with their mothers-in-law (44%) than with their own mothers (39%).

The majority of these disputes revolve around finances and child care, which shouldn’t come as a surprise, since these areas are common among the top stress factors in many relationships.

The researchers suggested that such tension may be “influenced by genetic conflict” as each person “unconsciously acts in the interest of their genetic kin” instead of in each individual’s best interest.

“This genetic conflict may cause affines (in-laws) to disagree about the distribution of resources and investment, just as we see mothers and fathers disagreeing in these domains,” the authors of the paper said. “Our results are consistent with the hypothesis that genetic conflict may underlie negative social interactions that occur in affinal (in-law) relationships.”

The researchers highlighted that animosity between in-laws is also likely because they “do not choose to have relationships with one another” but are forced into familial bonds as “unintended consequences” of their children’s romantic relationships.

The mother-in-law may have robbed the woman of her Christmas joy

Image credits: Annie Spratt / unsplash (not the actual photo)

“The act of giving actually does improve your happiness,” researcher Michael Norton, a psychologist who teaches at Harvard Business School, said.

He and his collaborators have published numerous studies on the effects of giving. For example, in one experiment that included about 700 people, the researchers randomly assigned participants to make either a purchase for themselves, or a stranger. Afterward, the participants reported how happy they felt. Turns out, giving to others, as opposed to spending on oneself, led to a significant happiness boost.

“If you take $5 out of your pocket today, the science really does show that spending $5 on yourself doesn’t do much for you,” Norton explained. “But spending that $5 on somebody else is more likely to increase your happiness.”

Consider a scarf. If you buy one for yourself, it’s just another thing you own. But if you buy it for someone else, “you’ve shown them that they’re important to you,” Norton said. Either way, it’s just a scarf, “but it can either be a throwaway object or something that cements a relationship between two people.”

However, when someone who actively declares they don’t want to be a part of the holiday ritual enters what’s supposed to be a two-people affair, it’s easy to imagine how it can suddenly become less special.

After her story went viral, the woman joined the discussion in its comment section

People just couldn’t believe that someone would risk ruining Christmas like this

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