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'AITA for calling out my aunts at a wedding because of their kids' tantrums?' UPDATED

'AITA for calling out my aunts at a wedding because of their kids' tantrums?' UPDATED

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"AITAH for not wanting to apologize for calling out my aunts at a wedding?"

Here's the original post, shared on Christmas Eve:

I (26f) have been with my partner (27f) for 5 years, and we are getting married next year. Overall, the wedding planning has gone pretty smoothly until now. For context, there is a large age gap in my family when it comes to the grandchildren on my mother's side (my dads an only child).

My mother had me in her mid 20s and my 2 aunts waited till they were in their late 30s to have kids so i've just been more of an extra aunt to a lot of my cousins as theirs about 4 of them all between 6 and 10 (all girls) except for my cousin ‘kate’ (25f) who is the daughter of my mothers older brother .

Now I love my family i do, but my aunts have always been the kinda parents who can never say no to their precious children, and that has resulted in them being spoilt brats. Over the last decade, there has not been 1 family event that hasn't been ruined in some capacity by a child having a tantrum over something stupid.

in the last year alone we've had tantrums over not wanting to leave a party even though the party place was closing, not having the correct flavour of strawberry ice cream at our grandfathers 85th bithday or just getting a pack of hairbows that didn't match eachothers and many others that tbh the reason why are so stupid they feel made up.

and these tantrums are bad, like the full screaming, pounding the floor, and enough tears to water a field until their mothers give into their demands. the husbands are just real walkovers, tbh and let their wives deal with the kids. it took a long time to even bring my partner to one of our many family events just because i always knew these tantrums were gonna happen, and i didn't want to scare her away.

I work with kids so i know this is beyond not normal behavour of kids and i know the lack of discipline is to blame but i've never been in the position to call it out cause in my family its very much if you don't have kids your opinion of how to raise them dosen't count but as the kids have gotten older its gotten so much worse.

now onto the wedding planning. we are not having a large wedding cause neither of us want it. between our family members we want there and are friends. it's just over 100 people. My partners family has no kids under 16 and when the idea of having a child free wedding came up it was clear my partner liked the idea of no one under 16.

and tbh i was happy with it as well as our dogs were gonna fill the roles of ringbearer and flower girl anyway and we both knew there was gonna be at least 1 tantrum and neither of us wanted to subject our friends and her family to those. My parents and grandparents agreed that it would be nice to have no kids for a change, and with that, we sent the invitations out.

not long after the invitations went out, we had my cousin kates wedding. She grew up 3 hours away and hasn’t turned up to really any family events in the last decade, but her mother made her invite everyone to show off as there were over 400 people. Don’t get me wrong, you could tell a lot of money was put into the event, and it was lovely, but I personally wouldn’t have liked it for my day.

Her new husband had a niece and nephew so they did the flowergirl and ring bearer roles (and yes there were tantrums thrown when that news broke) and it only took 5 minutes into the wedding for a tantrum to happen cause one of the kids wanted to sit of the front and not a few pews back.

My partner has gotten into the habit after 4 years of these events of keeping track of the tantrums on her notes app, and she counted 3 in the church alone. It only got worse as it was raining after, and the kids didn't want to wear jackets to get to the car, and many tears happened.

The meal wasn’t much better, but thankfully, we were at the head table with my grandparents away from it, but you couldn’t not hear the whining and shouting occasionally throughout the meal. Things got bad when, at some point before dessert, two of the kids came up to me and asked why they were not invited to my wedding as they had been for kates.

A bit stunned I just replied that the place we were having it was only for adults. That obviously was the wrong answer cause almost immediately another tantrum about how apparently their parents had promised them they would be the flower girls at my wedding erupted.

Thankfully their small for their age, so it was pretty easy to pick them up and move them away from the head table, which was on a stage and away from people staring. While this was happening, my parents were confronted by my aunts asking how was it that their kids were not invited. My parent just repeated the same thing as i had said, and this also wasn’t good enough .

At this point, my grandfather and I were behind them with 2 of their screaming children. I honestly don’t know what came over me, but i blurted out, "You really cannot see why i might not want to have your children there on my wedding day? Can you please stop discussing this right now is not the time and people are already staring at us"

Well let's just say that while most of my family agreed with what i said, now my aunts are refusing to attend the wedding until i apologise to them and their kids and invite them.

Some family members think it was the wrong time to say anything or just apologie to keep the peace but honestly i dont want to as i don’t think what i said was that bad especially considering the thing i knew that the grooms family were saying after the wedding from what i heard from Kate and her new husband.

Do you think she has anything to apologize for? This is what top commenters had to say:

lyingdogfacepony66 said:

NTA. Enjoy the wedding without your aunts.

mtngrl60 said:

I’m dying laughing. I’m surprised everyone has let it go this long. As far as I’m concerned, you’re the hero of the day. The only thing I would be doing now is contacting my aunts and telling them that I understand they are no longer coming to the wedding. So please consider their invitations resend it.

And that I appreciate the heads up early so that I can fill their spots with people who I wasn’t able to invite before. And do not back down. When they start to fuss about being uninvited, tell them that it is already too late.

You were just contacting them to thank them for letting you know early. But you have already invited other people, so no, neither they nor their husbands are invited any longer. And if anyone else in the family starts to make noise, tell him you have more friends waiting in the wings if they’d like to be uninvited as well.

IVBIVB said:

NTA, and this looks like the absolute best case scenario, the offenders took themselves out of the equation. Congrats! (on the wedding plus getting the Aunts to self-exclude)

celticmusebooks said:

How do you "apologize" when you've literally done nothing wrong. "Auntie, I'm sorry your kids are brats with no manners or self control" is the only one I can think of. Tell your aunts thanks for letting you know they can't make it. NTA

Verdict: A unanimous NTA.

A few days later, she shared this update on the situation:

I had planned ahead of time to spend Christmas with my partner and in-laws who live over an hour away and then celebrate Boxing Day back at home with my parents and grandparents but to my surprise my mother contacted me late on Christmas day just to say the boxing day celebrations were called off after a disastrous Christmas meal with the family,

which at the last minute included the aunts and the children. So apparently they had decided that as the family had been going nc in the week since the events at my cousins Kate's wedding they were gonna turn up to my great-grandmother's house for Christmas and confront me about it to my face to make me apologise for calling out their kids behaviour.

They usually do their own thing at Christmas and often go to their in-laws (forgot to mention they are married to brothers who are 2 of the weirdest men I’ve ever met but that's a rant for another day). I guess they thought if my 99 year old great grandmother (my mothers, moms mom) was present I wouldn't refuse their demands.

However they failed to check that I might not be there and according to my father, their faces when they realized their plan had backfired were hilarious. Obviously, their little terrors were running rampant and screaming their heads off and one even had a temper tantrum cause there were no presents for them under the tree.

The aunts had turned up in the middle of the Christmas meal several hours after all the presents were opened but apparently, the kid couldn’t comprehend that according to my aunt. At one point my great-grandmother got so annoyed at the screaming she yanked her hearing aids out.

No one in the family had thought to fill her in with what had gone down at Kate's wedding. It was one of those we all thought someone else had done so she was a bit confused at first. She knew the wedding was childfree so she couldn’t understand why they were making such a fuss about it and to just get over it.

She said she’d like to enjoy the likely last wedding she’ll ever attend in peace away from screaming children (My family has a very dark sense of humor).Between that and what I had said earlier, I think most of my family have just had enough of their crazy excuses.

Obviously after great granny said this they went on about their poor angels but they didn’t have much of a leg to stand on as pretty soon after they opened their mouths the terrors had gotten into my grandmother's homemade baked Alaska and had dropped it ruining the desert for everyone.

Apparently, my grandfather just snapped and told them to get out and let them enjoy one family event in peace and they needed to get their children's behavior in order if they ever wanted to be invited to another family event as their children's behavior was out of line and was only gonna backfire of them the older they got.

This man had served for over 10 years in the army and another 25 years as a police officer and is terrifiying when he snaps so understandably they got out of there asap. My great grandmother even opened one of her fancy bottles of whisky to celebrate.

My grandfather had been one of those who did not want to disinvite them and keep the peace (He's financially contributing to the wedding) but when I got home yesterday he gave me full permission to rescind their invitations.

I had originally decided to not rescind my aunt's invitations but give them a warning that if they turn up with their children or try to cause a scene they will be escorted off the property immediately.

But now after an emergency family meeting on boxing day we ended up just rescinding their invitations and instead just using what we would have spent on the four meals on jewelry for myself, my mom, grandmother and great grandmother as a memento.

My parents and partner are 100% behind me on this and we’re lucky that our venue is owned by my soon to be in-laws and with that security is included in the cost as they have had several crazy family members stories from renting it out for weddings and events over the last 30+ years. It's run in house by my soon to be brother in law so we have full control of who is allowed on the property during the wedding.

My maid of honor and bestie has also volunteered herself in the case of one of them turning up in a white dress to be the one to take one for the team and ‘spill’ a glass of red wine.

Her back up plan is using my doys (both West Highland terriers who will be at the wedding) who are trained to pee on command and have an ‘accident’. She's a drama teacher so I'd be pretty confident in her being able to make it look convincing as an accident if a worse-case scenario happened.

In terms of if I knew the kids coming up to me at the wedding was their parents way of guilt-tripping me yes I did know. This is far from the first time it has happened. For example When one of the terrors had their holy communion it fell around the same time my partner and I had adopted our two dogs.

We hadn’t expected to get two but they were inseparable and we just fell in love with them immediately and took both home. My job requires me to work saturday mornings so couldnt attend the church service for the communion and there was not real way to could get it off,

so early on i made sure everyone knew i wouldn’t be attending the church service making sure to hand deliver a card with money in for the child the day before with a small gift cause apparently to my aunts money doesn't count as a gift.

Anyway later on at the meal the sister of child who had their communion just came straight up to me during the event and asked me why I never turned up to the church in front of everyone and asked where was their puppy. Apparently, my aunt had told them one of my puppies was for them.

Let's just say tantrums happened and the puppy they did end up getting lasted 1 week as nowit lives with my in-laws. They hadn’t pulled that stunt in a while at least not to myself so I guess that's what threw me off more than anything else.

As with what was said by kates in-laws not long after i got back to the table Kate's now mother-in law sent us over a round of drinks to help with our growing headaches and there was a lot of how on earth do you deal with this on a regular basis? and oh boy they're gonna be nightmares when they're older.

We were also betting with the rest of the bridal party when the next tantrum would happen (my partner won betting when there would be one just before the speeches) and a few rounds of who could guess what the reason for a tantrum was thanks to my partners 4 year long notes.

Kate's in-laws also share my family's dark humor so later in the night we were betting which would be the worst once the teenage years and all those hormones hit. Was it the most adult way of dealing with it…probably not but was too drunk and annoyed to care about that.

Sources: Reddit
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