Mother-in-law from hell redeemed by missed moment

Channel Seven reality series, Bride and Prejudice, kicked off on Wednesday night with all the drama we’d expect from a show that combines hastily-organised weddings with irate parents.

A recipe for success... I mean disaster.

One particularly contentious relationship is between wild-eyed mother-in-law Laurelle, her son Nathan, and his bride-to-be Codie-Lea, who Laurelle describes as a ‘plastic b*tch’.

She drops other choice comments about her future daughter-in-law, including that she ‘hates her guts’ and ‘if she was on fire I wouldn’t even spit on her’, and explains that she hasn’t seen the pair, or their daughter Star, in over a year after they had a dramatic falling out.

Each party is given an opportunity to tell their side of the story, and amidst what sounded like ranting and raving from all sides, an interesting development emerges that may absolve Laurelle of some of the blame.

Codie-Lea recounts that one year ago, Laurelle took her newborn baby out into the public, unvaccinated, without her permission, and that’s what kicked off the cavernous rift.

“When Star was three weeks old, I woke up and she was gone from the house,” the 21-year-old explains.

“Laurelle had taken her shopping when she was unvaccinated. I freaked out... you don’t just take someone kid out of their house without their permission. It’s unacceptable what she did and it felt like she had kidnapped my daughter.”

Textbook crazy mother-in-law, right?

Well no, not quite.

The moment you missed

Though the social media commentary suggests everyone is onboard the ‘Laurelle is nuts’ train, we’re all missing a major revelation that went down under our noses, but went over the majority of heads.

A blink-and-you’ll-miss-it exchange between mum and son later in the episode reveals a very different story to the one Codie-Lea relays.

When Laurelle and Nathan finally met face to face to try and figure things out, Nathan begs his mum to simply apologise and move on, and the mother drops the mother of all zingers.

“Why do I have to say sorry to Codie, when you told me to take Star [out that day]?”

Does he fall off his chair at the audacity?

Does he protest this assassination of character?

Nope, he admits to this version of events, and sort of breezes past it as if it’s a technicality and not the root cause of this whole mess.

His main argument is he said sorry to his future wife as he was at fault that day, and his mother should also apologise to her for his mistake.

Oh Nathan, you beautiful fool.

So Laurelle had in fact been acting on her son’s orders and has essentially been thrown under the bus and run over multiple times for good measure.

Look, she does herself no favours with the aforementioned trash talk, and a rational lady would probably roll her eyes, suck it up and get over it.

Instead, Laurelle takes a different tack, latching onto a character assassination of Codie-Lea, rather than her seemingly incompetent son, as her way forward.

“Everything she says, everything she does is gospel. Well it’s a load of bullsh*t,” she says.

“You’ve never ever stuck up for me once with her.”

And as much as Laurelle needs to tone down the wild-eyed, mule-like stubbornness, she kind of has a point.

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