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It's unfathomably hard to heal after losing a child, especially when interacting with others who may not know that you're still in mourning. For one woman, she faced this exact problem when a coworker forced her to hold her grandchild even though it was clear that the woman was just not into it. Now the woman is wondering if she was wrong to refuse her coworker. "Am I the *sshole here?" she asked.
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Though she knows it might seem terrible, the woman wrote in a post on Reddit that "it's painful" for her to be with kids after the loss of her child. "I don't even like looking at baby related stuff for gifts anymore," she added. "It's all just one big reminder of what I lost and can't have."
She added that she knows it bothers people when she refuses to hold their kids, but truthfully she's just not ready. "It still leaves me with deep sadness whenever I'm around one," she wrote.
So of course, things spiraled when her coworker brought a grandchild into work one day -- and wouldn't take no for an answer. "This coworker will parade the grandkids around (even though we see them once a week at least) and shove the baby into my arms," the woman wrote. But on that day, enough was enough.
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The woman told her coworker that she "didn't want to hold him" but the stubborn coworker "refused to take him back."
"So I set him on the floor," she wrote and added that he is old enough to walk so it shouldn't have been too big of a deal. "My coworker was really angry about it and told me I was out of line for setting the kid down (again she wouldn't pick him back up)," she wrote. "Am I the *sshole here?"
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No one should have to disclose their personal history to get another person to respect their wishes, and it's unfair that the OP's coworker couldn't just take her at her word that she was making her uncomfortable. That being said, the OP probably could tell her manager about the problem and let that person step-in to get her coworker to back off.
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