Husband describes wife as 'fat' to their children, claims 'it's not an offensive term.'
When this husband is upset with his wife, he asks Reddit:
'AITA for describing my wife as “fat” to our young children?'
My wife (41) and myself (44M) both work in education and believe in properly explaining things to our children (4F, 5M). We have agreed to never use “because I said so” reasoning with them.
My wife is unfortunately around 3st overweight. Her weight has crept up gradually since having the kids and I don’t think she was even aware of this gain until I gently raised the subject with her last year. She agreed she needs to remedy this.
Since then we have worked together to shift the excess weight and I’m proud to say she’s lost around 10lbs. But she still has a lot of work to do to reach her target weight.
She is best at sticking to her diet if there is no temptation around, so for Easter I got her flowers instead of an egg. She seemed happy with this.
Then yesterday my children were arguing over a missing Easter egg, each accusing the other of eating it. I knew instantly what had happened.
I asked my wife to tell the children where the egg (which was quite big) had really gone and she admitted she had eaten it.
My son (whose egg it was) was very upset and confused and asked his mum why she had eaten it. My wife replied that she would replace it (which would be impossible, as it’s now after Easter).
I pointed out that she had not answered the question our son had asked. He was very upset and he kept asking why she had stolen his egg. I felt it was unfair she hadn’t properly answered this, as he was getting more distressed.
My wife completely threw me under the bus here and said “because I wanted chocolate but daddy didn’t get me an egg”.
They already know the importance of healthy eating, so I explained that mummy was not wanting to eat too much sugar.
Several “but why?” questions down the line I finally said “because mummy is fat and needs to work on this by not eating sweeties”.
I used the word “fat” because my sister is fat and always says it is not a shameful thing and she prefers to be described this way. She says to not use the word implies there is something wrong with being fat.
I probably was an AH to presume my wife would feel the same way about this term, and I wonder if I should have said “overweight” instead? AITA?
Let's find out.
economyvoice8 writes:
“Mummy doesn’t want to eat too much sugar…mummy is fat and needs to work on this by not eating sweeties.”
Totally sounds like he’s monitoring and controlling. Nobody ever Successfully loses weight when someone else is calling them Names and patronizing them.
She was an AH for taking her kid’s candy and letting them think each other took it. Bad parent and selfish. He was the AH for all that dripping condescension and rudeness. ESH.
originalreyala writes:
Then the correct answer is ESH here. Learn how judgements on the sub work before getting mad at people who understand it better than you.
The wife stole candy from her own children then blamed her husband for this decision that was 100% her own fault. This is clear asshole behavior and much worse than calling her fat.
This is borderline NTA but he still should not have ever said that to his kids, so it's ESH. Anyone who thinks that stealing from your own kids and blaming your partner doesn't make you an asshole is being obtuse.
anaphalysis writes:
'I don’t think she was even aware of this gain until I gently raised the subject with her last year'
I assure you that she was aware of it. Not only have you, as is so often the case, denigrated a woman's body for being less than perfect by current beauty standards, but you have also shamed her in front of the children she bore for you. You owe her a big apology. YTA.