Thank you, maryjk…but we are in the minority here. It’s an emotional situation, & it appears that I have no compassion for the OP.
I know she has many physical & financial problems but the door is important.
How about a yes or no for the question :
"Should We Ask My In-Laws to Pay For This?
At this point, I say…YES !
Well, the OP may have gotten the impression that you had no compassion for her when you said that she must be avoiding fixing the door in order to buy, and I quote, “cell phones, I-pads & big screen TVs,” rather than assuming the best of her, which is true–i.e., that finances are sufficiently tight that she’s not using toilet paper, much less buying big-ticket luxury items. At the same time, you implied that she doesn’t work (“that’s what we work and save money for.”) or save money, when actually, until she was really late in pregnancy she was caring for numerous kids in her house in order to earn more money while being a SAHM and does all the money-saving stuff I enumerated in the earlier post.
When a number of us called you and others on that attitude, the general turn of the conversation became simultaneously to attack her for wanting the luxury item of a second minivan door
and to attack her for not fixing such an urgent safety issue ASAP–never mind that it did work until a few weeks ago, and as the OP pointed out, once it stopped actually working it became a rather higher priority. It’s only been broken like this for a few weeks, and was working acceptably until that point. If you’ve ever had kids yourself (I have no idea if you’re married, male, or female–this is not a snarky comment), you may be aware that the first few postpartum weeks (and the OP is only a couple of weeks PP) are both intense and busy, to say the least. Repairs for things that aren’t going to actively catch fire or explode go rather further down the list than trying to get what little sleep you can, recovering from labor, and figuring out breastfeeding all over again with a new person while chasing a toddler and preschooler.
She asked a reasonable question, and agreed with the majority of the responses–i.e., that she shouldn’t ask. What she objected to was being attacked on all fronts: don’t have kids unless you can afford every penny of every expense that comes up immediately, but have as many kids as you possibly can; this is an urgent safety issue and she’s a neglectful parent for not fixing it, but she’s also a Suzy Soccermom driving a “brand-new” (no, it isn’t) minivan for which she should be grateful, and she must not be grateful if she’s wanting the second door, which is obviously nothing but a gross capitalistic luxury, fixed; she must be spending money on big-ticket items while spending the family’s money freely to maintain her upscale lifestyle, but she should give up the job that brings in extra money because a second car itself, much less central heat in her house, is a luxury for which she should be ashamed.
And people wonder why moms are more prone to postpartum depression than they were in the past, or why they don’t feel supported by the church, or why women are less interested in having big families now than they were. Shockingly, when, as a mom, you’re attacked at every turn no matter what you do by the very people who are supposed to support you, you feel less and less like putting yourself in a situation in which you know you’re going to get jumped over and over and over again.
