Her in-laws mocked her in German thinking she wouldn’t understand — until she clapped back in perfect German

Marrying someone from a different culture and country has its merits and demerits. While you may gain new experiences, you might also face the wrath of your in-laws if they don’t like you. Something similar happened to a 27-year-old woman, u/Sea-Rip-9749, who shared on Reddit how her in-laws made insulting remarks about her appearance in their native language, German, assuming she didn’t understand it. The drama unfolded when they realized that she did understand. That’s when the woman confronted them in shock.

The woman and her 29-year-old husband, Peter, had been married for three years. They had one child together and were now expecting their second baby. While she was a Western Canadian, her husband was a native of Germany. The couple lived in Canada “for a long time,” but as inflation rates soared, “moving back to Germany seemed like a better option.” So they bought a new house in Hannover, Peter’s hometown. A day after their flight arrived in Germany, they visited Peter’s family. After their wedding, this was the second time the woman was meeting her in-laws. After this meeting, they started seeing each other more often. But soon, the woman realized that something was not right.

“I had started to realize that they would sometimes speak about me in German. They would make rude comments about my hair and makeup, question my fashion choices, and overall, were just very unkind to me. They also said mean things about my pregnant belly, which I was already insecure about,” she described in her post. Fed up by their behavior, she spoke to her husband about it. “I told him I didn’t like the way that they were treating me. I said that I hated how my every choice was judged. He told me that he would talk to his family,” she said.

With time, the cruel remarks stopped, and for about three months, the in-laws made no mean comments about her. She gave birth to a baby girl, and all was well in their family. But before she knew it, another clash was brewing behind the scenes. This time, the quarrel was about the name the couple had given to their baby: Lilith. “Peter’s family was very upset when they heard the name. If you didn’t know, Lilith means 'ghost' or 'of the night,'” the woman recalled. The couple had chosen this name not because of its meaning, but due to its significance in the woman’s family.

For a while, she didn’t visit her in-laws. But one day, it was unavoidable as it was her mother-in-law’s birthday. “As soon as we showed up, things started to go badly. Everybody wanted to hold Lilith, which made my mother-in-law upset because people weren’t paying attention to her and made me overwhelmed,” she described. At that time, the woman was experiencing a “pretty bad postpartum depression” and so she declined anyone who asked to hold her baby.

It wasn’t the end of their conflict. At dinnertime, the woman noticed that her sister-in-law and mother-in-law were gossiping about her and how she didn’t let them hold Lilith. Her sister-in-law even went on to call her “a fat ugly hokey addict,” assuming that she didn’t understand German. While her husband knew she was fluent in German, she had hidden this fact from her in-laws. She wanted to reveal this and surprise them on her mother-in-law’s birthday, but she ended up “surprising her for the wrong reason,” as she said in a comment.

When she heard them talking about her at the dinner table, she couldn’t hold back anymore. She turned to them and hit them with punches in their native language, shocking them with the realization that she could understand every word they had uttered about her. “The table instantly blew up. People were yelling at me because apparently, this was all my fault. I left with Peter, and we haven’t talked to them since,” the woman concluded her post, asking people on the platform if she did anything wrong.

Thousands of people came to her defense, with over 25,000 Reddit users upvoting the post. “Their treatment of you is inexcusable,” commented u/Chance_vegetable_780. u/proud_fee_1542 said that her husband needed to step up in situations like these. “At a minimum, I would refuse to visit them again until you get an apology from sister-in-law and mother-in-law (and anyone else who was talking about you),” they wrote. u/willy3726 lauded her for doing what she did: “I would have loved to be in the room when you settled the score! Good job!”