Every year, my mother-in-law secretly gave me a porcelain doll. At first, I thought they were harmless gifts, but one day, my husband accidentally found them and told me to burn them. 😱😱
Every year, my mother-in-law secretly gave me a porcelain doll.
At first, I thought they were harmless gifts. They were the same ones my mother used to give me as a child, and so I was even a little pleased.
I didn’t understand why a grown woman would need dolls, but I accepted them, so as not to offend my mother-in-law, and hid them in a box in the attic.
The second time, the situation repeated itself: the same porcelain doll, a similar face, and again a request not to tell my husband.
“You remember,” my mother-in-law said sternly, “my son mustn’t know about these dolls.”
“Yes, of course,” I replied. “They’re all in my drawer, he doesn’t know anything.”
I didn’t pay any attention to it. I thought maybe she was afraid her son would ridicule her—that he’d call these gifts stupid and useless. Ten years passed like that. Ten identical anniversaries, ten identical dolls.
But one day, my husband accidentally found the box of dolls. His face changed. He turned pale, as if he saw not dolls, but something terrible.
“What is this?” he asked sharply.
“Your mother’s gifts… for our anniversaries,” I was confused. “What?”
“Burn them immediately!” he screamed, pulling away in horror.
I didn’t understand why. But when he told me the truth, a chill ran through me. 😱😢 Continued in the first comment 👇👇
It turned out that many years ago, his mother had lost a child, about whom no one knew.
There was a belief in their family: every doll given as a gift replaces an unborn child. A woman who accepted such dolls risks losing the ability to bear a child herself.
“Now do you understand?” my husband looked at me with pain. “She was shifting her fate onto you.”
At first, I didn’t believe it. I thought it was just a terrible superstition. But after all, for ten years of marriage, we couldn’t have a child…
We burned the dolls. All ten of them. Their porcelain faces cracked and melted in the fire, and fear and relief warred in my heart.
And the most incredible thing happened a few months later. I became pregnant.
I’ll never bring myself to tell my mother-in-law about this. But to this day, it seems to me that sometimes, in the silence of the night, I hear the soft cracking of porcelain…
