My sister-in-law and I were very good friends. It was through her that I met her brother and we got married three years later. After the marriage, our friendship even grew stronger and stronger and we were like sisters. She is also married, she married a year before I married her older brother and we live in the same gated community so we meet to chat a lot. She has two daughters and I just gave birth to a baby boy. My mum is late and she has been helping me with bathing the baby as a first time mother. Her second daughter has a very severe form of asthma and I was aware of it but I didn’t know how severe it was until the incident that happened recently.
She left her kids with me because of work. It wasn’t the first time she has done that and I was on maternity leave so it wasn’t a big deal at all. What happened was that I couldn’t sleep throughout the midnight because of my baby, so when he finally slept in the afternoon, I took the opportunity to take a nap. The girls were watching TV. I must have slept very deeply because I woke up to a lot of screaming and crying around me. My baby was crying but one of my husband’s nieces was also crying. I carried my baby and rushed to check what the issue was and that was when I saw that the one with asthma was having an attack. She was lying on the floor trying hard to breath. I rushed to look for an inhaler in the bag they brought.
I emptied the whole bag, but there was no inhaler in it. So I had to rush her to the hospital. I was even crying on the way because my baby was crying in the back seat but I couldn’t attend to him because the girl was struggling to breath. Her sister was also in the car. When we got to the hospital, the girl was unconscious and I was scared she was dead, but thankfully she wasn’t. I called her mother at the hospital and she rushed to the place. When she came, her daughter was being treated. The girl went to a comma and that was when my sister-in-law blamed me for everything. She called me irresponsible and foolish. I angrily insulted her back. What kind of mother will forget her daughter’s inhaler when she knew her asthmatic attacks were severe? Thankfully, the child came out of the comma a few days after the incident.
Now the relationship between me and my sister-in-law is strained. My husband doesn’t like it at all because he feels like he is in between the two of us. My husband told me to just be the better person and apologise to her. We were both scared of losing her daughter and our emotions were all over the place. I called her for the first time after the incident but she cut the call. So one Saturday, I went to her house with my husband and baby to apologise to her so that we can be friends again. She was still very angry with me although her daughter was back to her normal self playing around the house. She insulted me even more and my husband was forced to leave the house with me because her sister was still very angry.
I am not bothered by the fact that she doesn’t want to have anything to do with me. I don’t like the story she is spreading amongst our circle of friends. She is telling people I was jealous of her all this while and I wanted her daughter to die. One of our mutual friends called me and asked me why I didn’t rush the child to the hospital early because the child said I was in my room and I had left them in the house to take care of themselves. She is making me the bad person and it’s so painful. I will never wish for the death of anyone’s child. I am a mother myself and I will never do that. I feel like it’s only my husband who believes my side of the story, everybody else is acting as if I am jealous of my sister-in-law and I wanted to see her suffer. But that is not true. How do I clear my name? Some of our mutual friends have made it obvious to me that I am a bad person and that is so wrong.