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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/LucyAriaRose on 2024-06-26 04:19:17+00:00.

I am NOT the Original Poster. That is u/Extreme-Bus7141. He posted in r/AmItheAsshole and his own page.

Mood Spoiler: frustrating for outside reasons, but hopeful for OOP and his wife

Original Post: June 17, 2024

I (21M) have been deployed for the past 10 months and I will be getting home in 1 week. My wife and I’s plan was for her to be the only one to know what date I was coming back, so that when I get leave we can go back and surprise all of our family and friends.

My wife (21F) visited home a couple weeks ago for a family event, and while she was there she spent a day with my mom and 2 younger sister (hs age). My mother is very pushy and hates surprises. So much so that me surprising her by coming home would make her mad at me. My wife and I knew we would eventually have to tell her because of this, but we’re waiting until the last minute because she would have told my sisters if she knew my date. Well, while my wife was there, my mom pushed and pushed. Telling her that she wouldn’t speak to her, let the girls go places, and she had to know so she could take days off work. My wife gave her a week range of my leave (a couple weeks after I get back) so that she could request off.

Well, my mom texted me today Telling me that she would be here for the welcome home when our plane lands. I asked if she cleared this with my wife, seeing as she apparently planned to stay with us in our 1 bedroom apartment, and she said no. I asked if the girls knew and were coming, and she said no.

My mom has done a few things that presses between my wife and I, so I lost it on her. Told her I wouldn’t be giving her the date that I fly in, that if I wanted her there I would want my sisters there as well. I stopped there until she started complaining that she was a single mom who raised me on her own, and that I should want to see her first. That’s when I told her I didn’t want her in my house at all when I first get home. I am a married, grown man now, I don’t need my mom, I want to see and spend time with my wife first and foremost. She pressed further saying “I’ve been here for u since before u were born, she’s been here for 4 years.” Eventually trash talking my wife, saying she doesn’t even have a real job and doesn’t contribute. My wife is a nanny while she is in school, and she gets paid well, so she absolutely does contribute more than enough.

This is where I may be the asshole. I told my mom that I was tired of her badgering, that I wanted to come home to my wife and be alone in our home with our pets. My wife and I would not want to host her, and we wanted the house to ourselves so that we can have sex wherever and whenever we please because we haven’t seen each other in so long.

My mom cried. She’s sending me long paragraph texts every few hours about how she doesn’t know where her caring son went, about how I need to let my wife go because I use her for her body, about how all I care about is my own pleasure, and I have no care for my family at all.

So Reddit, AITA? I haven’t responded to the messages my mother is sending, but if I get ideas from the possible comments, I might

Relevant Comments:

Commenter: Good job finally standing up to her. Stop giving her info and stop talking to her. “Mom until you learn to act like an adult and stop trash talking my wife to me, I will not be communicating with you. I am very disappointed in you and how incredibly selfish and immature you are acting.” Don’t make your wife deal with this jerk.

OOP: I haven’t given her info. She told me she was coming for my plane to land and she didn’t even know when that date was. The only info she got was from my wife, and was quite literally worded as “he will likely have leave within these few weeks, but those weeks could change.”

Could she find you at the airport?

OOP: She won’t be able to even if she wanted to. The runway we land on is on base.

(to a different commenter): She literally cannot get onto base without me or my wife with her, or my permission for a visitors pass. I won’t be giving that permission, so she can try everything she wants. She’s not getting in.

Commenter: You need to tell your CO and XO about your mom. Do not put it past her to try contacting your unit to get information on where you are, when you are, and how you are coming home. As embarrassing as it is, you’ve got to protect yourself here and probably go low to no contact with your mom for a while.

OOP: She did this in basic training. Called the base I was at SO MANY TIMES that they had to pull me from intake to call her and tell her to leave people alone. After that, I knew she didn’t need information. She doesn’t even fully know my MOS.

Commenter (part of a longer comment): She’s an example of a manipulative parent. Here’s a paragraph from a article about manipulative parents, and their signs : “Parents using emotional blackmail will often threaten to withdraw their love or approval if the child does not comply with their wishes. This can manifest as guilt-tripping the child, making them feel responsible for the parent’s happiness, or expressing extreme disappointment when the child does not meet their expectations.”

OOP: That paragraph fits what she’s been doing to a tee. What confuses me is none of my mom’s behavior like this started until we got married. Before, when she was my gf, she always wanted her around, joked about trading me and my wife, invited her everywhere my family went, now it bothers her when we spend time together and she isn’t invited when she thinks she should/can be.

Commenter: She’s jealous of your wife. She want’s to be close to you (platonically, of course). I’ve heard cases like these. She obviously cannot grasp the idea of you becoming an adult. You need to tell her know your not her little boy anymore.

OOP: I have. It didn’t work much, so I just started going LC. Mostly keeping it about my sisters, if we will visit, and of course this because I wasn’t willing to just let her think she could step in on me and my wife. ESPECIALLY without consulting my wife first, considering she is the only one home taking care of our place right now

Commenter: sounds like a tough situation, man. i had something similar with my in-laws once - it’s not easy to navigate family dynamics sometimes. do you think she’d respond better if your wife talked to her instead?

OOP: No, I think she would go after her more honestly. After her telling my wife she wouldn’t speak to her or let my sisters spend time with us if my wife didn’t tell her when I’d visit home, I think having my wife tell her she isn’t welcome would go just the same if not worse.

Not only that, but my wife is a people pleaser. She extremely sweet and would do anything to accommodate anyone, even if it isn’t what she wants. She’s getting better about having a “stronger spine” as she calls it, but I don’t want to put her into a position that would make her uncomfortable.

If my mom went to my wife herself, I would want my wife to stand up for herself, but I don’t want to ask her to do that for me.

Commenter: OMG, you need to go either NC or very LC with your mom. JFC, wow, that’s just…wow… been there…mom was the last thing I thought about when I got back from deployment. I mean God forbid you get stationed overseas. What will she do then fucking move in? You need to nip that in the bud now.

OOP: I already don’t contact her much outside of for my sisters and neither does my wife. Our plan when my contact ends is to move to a base even farther from home, where we would have to fly for visits. That would take our amount of visits down a lot because we travel with our pets, but they’re both large dogs and we don’t want to put them under a plane, and plane tickets on top of pet boarding is expensive. If people would want to see us, they would have to come to us.

Oh and my mom refuses to get on a plane ;)

Commenter: NTA. Your mom is way too involved in your life. Has she always had such an unhealthy attachment to you?

OOP: After reading the comments and thinking back on how things have been when I was a kid to now, it seems that when our dad passed away I became her stand in.

(to a different commenter) She practically expected me to be a “father figure” to my sisters starting at 8. Even now, I have my mom’s calls blocked because when my sisters are in trouble, she calls me and tells me to talk to them instead of dealing with it herself.

OOP is voted NTA

Update Post: June 19, 2024 (2 days later)

A few people asked to stay updated, so here is the first one. Spoiler alert, it’s not necessarily a fun one.

Unfortunately, because of another wife sharing our flight date all over Facebook, our return has been pushed back an entire month.

I called my wife to let her know, and we are both devastated. I only had enough time for one phone call, so I asked my wife to let family and friends know, including my mo…

Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1dopu3o/aita_for_telling_my_mom_i_did_not_want_her_there/

  • SpacehooksEnglish
    1·
    3 days ago

    Update Post: June 19, 2024 (2 days later)

    A few people asked to stay updated, so here is the first one. Spoiler alert, it’s not necessarily a fun one.

    Unfortunately, because of another wife sharing our flight date all over Facebook, our return has been pushed back an entire month.

    I called my wife to let her know, and we are both devastated. I only had enough time for one phone call, so I asked my wife to let family and friends know, including my mother.

    Yes, I know many people might not be happy about that, but again. She didn’t recieve a date, my wife’s text to her was just that I would not be returning until a month later, or more.

    My mother’s reaction to that news has truly solidified what many comments were telling me. I was raised by a narcissist. Her text back to my wife was “Oh, that’s great! That is actually is much better timing for me!”

    My wife’s response to my mother was: “Do not say that to (my name). He is devastated that he will be gone longer, and he has been talking about wanting to be home asap since just a few months in. I wish you wouldn’t have even said it to me, as I’m devastated by his return being delayed as well. It is extremely selfish for you to be glad he is away from home for even longer simply because it works better for you. I have never in my life heard of a mother being glad that her child will be overseas longer than what was planned.” After that, she blocked my mom. Her shiny spine is really developing!

    I have not reached out to my mother, and I will not be doing so. I won’t block her, as with my sisters being minors, I would like for one of us, my wife or I, to have at least some line of communication in case of some family emergency. However, I will not be texting or calling, and any of her texts or calls will not be answered unless I consider them an emergency.

    There were a few questions and deeper explanations from my original post, so I figured I would go into them deeper here.

    My father passed away when I was 6. Ever since then, my mom has sort of relied on me when it came to raising my sisters. Even with them being high school aged, it continued. When I went into the military, my mom got upset, saying things at home would be just terrible with me gone, that she didn’t know how she would handle my sisters on her own, and that life would seem more pointless without her son in it every single day. When my wife and I got married and moved to my first duty station, she begged to trade my sisters off, sending one of them to stay with us every few weeks, where they would stay in our living room. She even told us we would need to purchase a hide-a-bed couch for it to work out. Obviously, that had never happened as I told her my sisters were my sisters, and her kids. It was not my responsibility to raise them.

    My mom and I were very close when I was growing up. I considered her one of my best friends, and someone I could always go to. That changed when I got married. I also realized that some of the things she did were not healthy or good parenting moments.

    My mom started purchasing condoms for me when I was only 12. She was very open about sex with me, and was not one to shy away from it. She was completely fine with me having sex at such a young age, which did lead me to being a bit of a man-whore. Before my wife, I constantly snuck girls in, snuck out to hang out with girls, and whatever else. My wife was the first girl that I brought to my house during the day, introduced to my family, invited her for dinner. My wife was also very strict with her views on sex when we started dating. We were friends before, so she knew I was a bit of a player. Where I viewed sex as something fun, she viewed it as something that should only be between 2 people who truly love each other. She was not down for it until a few months into us dating, and I was willing to wait for her. We still snuck around, but when she snuck me in, we quite literally played Mario cart, watched movies, and hung out all night.

    When this part of me changed, it changed something about my mom for some reason. She did used to ask about girls I was sleeping with when I was in high school, but when she asked about my wife when we started dating, and I told her we weren’t doing anything like that, she got frustrated about me “lying.” She stopped buying me condoms, which I was fine with because I didn’t need them in the beginning and when I did, I was 18 and completely fine buying them myself. Before my wife and I ever did have sex, she would come in my room and scream about how she didn’t want me having sex under her roof. I thought that she just realized that encouraging a minor to have sex wasn’t ok.

    My mom also liked my wife when she was just my girlfriend. This always confused me until I read people’s comments. Her going from loving her, inviting her to everything, asking where she was when she wasn’t with me, to trash talking her didn’t make sense to me until people in the comments of my last post clarified that it was the fact that she was my wife. Her being permanent is what my mother doesn’t like.

    And as far as “cock blocking” my mom has happily done that since we’ve been married. She screeched and hid her face when I kissed my wife at our wedding, she begged us to sleep on a pallet in her living room on our wedding night (we didn’t), she tried calling 3 times a day when we first moved (once around the time I usually got off work, once either during or after dinner, and once at night. Sometimes while my wife were mid tango, sometimes when we were already asleep.) it was very rare that I actually answered these calls, and when she realized her calls were muted they faded away. She FaceTimed seemingly once an hour on our 1st wedding anniversary, again, I didn’t answer. Her wanting us to host her when I 1st got back was not her being clueless. She knew what she was trying to do.

    Now that I have a new return date, my mother will not even know the possible weeks I might have leave. She won’t need to, I do not plan on seeing her outside of maybe going out to eat with her, my wife, and the rest of my family. My wife will be organizing it, and will be able to ask my sisters about days my mother is off work.

    That’s all I have as far as an update right now. I may post more before returning just based on how things go. I can imagine I will have plenty of an update when I do actually return.