A mother has received the support of anonymous Reddit users after allowing her children to bother their father during a work meeting.
The 31-year-old woman took to Reddit’s popular confession forum, Am I The A**hole, to ask the internet if she made the right parenting decision. She started by explaining how she and her husband, 36, shared two sons – a five year old and a seven year old.
Usually, she works from home, running her own business, while her husband works in an office most days. However, he’ll work from their house a few days a week, but he prefers to leave because he thinks the house is “distracting”.
“I don’t have a lot of daily work, just some emails and planning (maybe three hours a day?) but the business does make about a third of our household income,” she explained. “But my younger son is home all day and just dealing with him takes a lot of energy. He’s really high energy and will probably wreck something if you leave him alone for an hour.”
Her seven-year-old son comes home around three in the afternoon every day. Then, if her husband is at the office, she’ll be with the children alone until eight or nine at night.
Recently, the Redditor and her spouse got into a fight when she didn’t have dinner prepared for him when he returned home.
She said: “He was also tired and we were both short tempered so we ended up snapping at each other.
“He said I should have at least ordered before he got home and he was hungry, I said I forgot and it’s not fair that food is always my problem,” the Reddit user continued. “He said that I’m home all day and I even admit I don’t have much work to do, so I’m basically a SAHM and should at least take care of dinner.”
Her husband then offered to take care of their children for a day while he worked from home, to prove to her it was not difficult. The plan was set for the following day.
The Redditor admitted: “I slept in, and when I woke up he was already frazzled from getting the older one ready for school. He ended up having to cancel a meeting to make breakfast, and was worried about that.”
On top of that, their sons went to play in the yard and tracked mud through the house. She didn’t help her husband clean the mess up.
She confessed: “By this point I did feel sort of guilty because it was definitely harder for him to take care of work at the same time, but all I wanted was an apology. He said he was doing this to show that I do nothing all day, and if he just admitted he was wrong I would have helped out straight away.”
The worst happened when the Reddit user’s husband had a meeting in the afternoon. Their sons got into an argument during his meeting, leaving the five year old upset and in tears just 20 minutes into it.
“He was really loud and my husband’s video was also on, then he told the kid to leave him alone but he was upset and crying and wasn’t listening,” the original poster explained. “After a few mins my husband went back to the meeting and apologised to the other people. When it was finished, he was really angry at me.”
Her husband argued that she just stood by, refused to help him, and let the drama unfold. The Redditor added: “He said I could see what was happening and I just watched him struggle without helping. I said all you had to say was please help, he said I shouldn’t be so petty and prideful.”
The Reddit user confessed she didn’t think allowing their son disrupting his meeting for “a few minutes” was a “huge deal”. Still, she acknowledged that the situation probably didn’t make him look good in front of his boss.
She finished by asking whether she was in the wrong.
Readers flooded her comments section, the majority arguing she had every right to let the situation transpire as it did.
“If I’m not reading the post completely wrong they’re your husbands kids as well? So not sure why point one is worded as it is with the ‘I didn’t step in to help when *my* kids were disturbing him,’” one blunt individual pointed out. “He said he could handle it, he couldn’t - that’s on him.”
Another reader said: “You’re justified in your pettiness but his pride is getting in the way. Did he even manage to make dinner?”
“He suggested this bet. Not your fault he lost, miserable. Well done, but it’s too bad he’s not admitting he was wrong. You still need that,” a third added.
Other readers suggested disciplining their children to not be such “handfuls” all the time.
One Reddit user wrote: “A five year old and seven year old should be old enough to play together and not disturb their parents unless someone was hurt or something was broken.”
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