Mom Refuses To Spend Christmas With Daughter When She Lands In The Hospital By Eating Food She Knew Would Make Her Sick

It can be rough to have food sensitivities, especially when you’re a teenager and most of your life is spent trying to fit in.

I imagine this would be made ten times worse when the foods you can’t eat are all of the “fun” stuff teenagers gobble up without a second thought.

OP’s daughter has a sensitive stomach that is triggered by exactly those types of foods. There are no medical explanations thus far and no way to treat it except for dietary changes, so when the daughter “cheats,” she can end up in the ER.

My (39F) daughter (16F) has had a sensitive stomach ever since she was a kid. There are certain foods that will upset her stomach to the point where she’s unable to stop throwing up.

We’ve seen countless doctors, but so far nobody’s been able to give us a clear answer. The only advice we keep getting is to identify all trigger foods and cut them from her diet.

We have a pretty good idea of what those foods are: soda and other carbonated drinks, chips, cheetos, and other similar processed snacks, anything oily or fried and most sweets. Unfortunately, this is exacty the kind of stuff my daughter loves to eat the most.

And as horrible as she feels after she has them, she still refuses to cut them out of her diet, which in turn led to her spending a lot of time in the hospital during the past few years.

OP used to be able to keep those foods from her daughter, but as she’s gotten older, OP has had to accept that her teenager will make her own choices.

When she was little, it was easier to keep all these foods away from her because I simply wouldn’t buy them. But now that she’s older, I can’t always be there to check what she eats.

She eats the greasy pizza at her school’s cafeteria, she trades her lunch with her classmates, she goes out with her friends and stops to eat at KFC and so on.

And it always ends with her in the ER, crying and shaking because she can’t stop throwing up.

On Christmas, her daughter chose to make some bad decisions. When she ended up in the hospital, OP refused to go and sit with her as she usually did.

This was the case on this Christmas eve as well, when our whole family gathered at our place. And of course, among the many dishes at our Christmas table were some of her main trigger foods, like chips, soda, chocolate and sweets.

Now mind you, these were far from the only foods available to her. We also had a variety of home-cooked, traditional dishes on the table, with ingredients that don’t upset her stomach, like vegetables, meat, dairy etc. All of them delicious and well-seasoned – my daughter herself says she really likes most of these dishes.

Despite this, my daughter chose to eat nothing but her trigger foods. I reminded her that they’d make her feel awful, but she said she didn’t care, because Christmas is only once a year and she just wants to live a little.

Well, this ended with her violently throwing up in the ER a few hours later. She had to be hospitalized for a few days and only just got out of the hospital a few hours ago.

And unlike all the previous times when something like this happened, this time I chose to spend my Christmas relaxing at home with the rest of our family, and not in the hospital by my daughter’s side.

Her daughter was upset and most of her family thought she went too far in teaching her a lesson.

I kept in touch with her through calls and texts, and told her that if she needed anything I’d ask a family member to bring it to her, but I made it clear that I would not be visiting her during her stay.

And well, my daughter didn’t take this too well. She cried every time we talked on the phone, begged me to come over, told me how horrible I was for ‘abandoning’ her there all alone and so on.

Most of our family didn’t take my side in this either, and during the past few days I got called everything from ‘a little extreme’ to downright cruel and heartless.

AITA, Reddit?

Does Reddit agree? I’m curious!

The top comment says the daughter is officially old enough to know better.

This person says parenting sometimes involves tough love.

And this commenter thinks maybe she’ll take it more seriously when she has to pay for her own ER visits.

They do think OP should consider therapy for her daughter, if she hasn’t.

In the meantime, she can’t expect others to drop everything when she’s willingly made a mistake.

It’s sad that she would rather feel awful than left out.

The people who suggested therapy are probably on the right track.