'AITA for closing the door on my neighbor's face after disrespecting my peanut brittle?'
"AITA for closing my door on my neighbor's face?"
I'm a 20-year-old guy, and I still live with my dad at his house. My mom was in a lengthy battle with breast cancer, and she passed in August. It wrecked me on so many levels that I was not prepared for. On top of losing my hero, I felt like I should stay with my dad to be here with him and support him.
One of those things is keeping up with traditions and recipes passed down from my mom. It’s been really hard for holidays to even capture a fraction of the spirit of when my mom would do them, as she was the backbone of setting stuff up, preparing food, and decorating. But this is where we run into a problem.
When my mom was alive, she would make peanut brittle, some fudge, and double chocolate crinkled cookies. She would make up to 30 batches of them to put in containers and hand them out to family, friends, my siblings' co-workers, and, of course, the neighbors.
This is my first real year making all these sweets by myself, and I'm really not committed to doing all this baking while I'm in college, balancing a job, and running a side hustle to make extra money.
I’m just too damn sad from grieving and too tired from school and work to do loads of batches. In fact, the only reason I’m making these sweets is because they’re yummy—I cannot lie—and I know my dad would appreciate them.
I just started attempting to make them. I’ve only made two small test batches, and they were good—not as good as my mom's—but this is when my neighbor knocks on my door. I answer, expecting a Christmas card, and she says, "Hi, I was wondering if you had got any of the peanut brittle done?"
So I explain, like, "Ah yeah, I’m trying to perfect the recipe, but I don’t know if I can send them out this year." And then she asks, "Oh, (Mom’s Name) is really slacking behind this year."
At this point, I’m thinking to myself, does she not know my mom passed away? Then I’m thinking, we told her the news about it spreading and about my mom being too tired to do any neighborhood walking around the block with her friends.
So I’m dumbfounded that she can’t put two and two together—that she ISN’T ABLE TO MAKE peanut brittle. So I tell her my mom passed away in August, and she just looks at me with a surprised expression. She says, with an almost confused tone, "So you’re not making peanut brittle at all? How about tomorrow?"
At that point, I close the door. I’m kind of just standing there, hand in a fist, because I’m about to break down into an ugly cry and other bad emotions. My dad finally comes out of his room and asks who it was, was it a package, and I tell him it was the neighbor wanting peanut brittle.
He looked confused and told me, "You haven’t even figured out the right temperature yet," in a joking way. But right as he says that, my neighbor texts him, saying that I was being snarky to her. So I tell him the full story, and he gets teary-eyed because we’re still grieving my mom. He was like, "More lighter-than-usual peanut brittle for us."
So, AITAH? I feel like I could’ve been worse by either yelling or just flat-out crying, but me closing the door in a fast manner was all I could really think to do. I didn’t mean to upset her. I’m thinking all this stuff—maybe she didn’t know and is processing it—but she knew my mom was barely able to walk 100–200 feet and was always tired. So I’m just like, yeah, I don’t know.
Here are the top rated comments that OP responded to:
AbjectGovernment1247 says:
Your neighbour is an entitled cow. Don't give her any brittle. I don't care how much you end up making, only give it to those who have shown you love during this horrible time. NTA.
OP responded:
Thanks for this, I'm starting to see this clearly. My mind is like a mess of all sorts of emotions saying different things, but if I look hard into it, I guess I felt like I would've been TAH, because I didn't have candy ready like my mom. But that's just grief and own insecurity talking.
CanadienSaintNk says:
As for this situation, you're definitely NTA. She was insensitive, out of line and completely lacking any compassion. I would have closed the door on her face the moment she said your mom was slacking but to not even bother offering condolences after you said she passed away...human trash. The only way out of that is maybe if your mom had put drugs in her brittle and turned her into some peanut brittleaine addict.
OP responded:
She definitely had it down to a T, before she got really fatigue and tired last year, I was trying to learn from the best, and I was trying to stretch that peanut brittle out, and she was “DID YOU OIL THE PAN, YOU PUT TO LITTLE, OH GOSH DARN! HURRY” and first batch this year came to thick because I couldn’t stretch it out. She’s probably looking down and saying “Told you to oil the pan more”