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How would YOU respond to this email if you got it from an in-law?
AIBU, which stands for 'Am I Being Unreasonable', is the perfect platform for sharing your thoughts and opinions! So, for today's AIBU discussion, we have this story from ThoughtIndividual114 on Reddit.
'Sunday evening we (me F46, husband M46 and daughter F7) were invited to visit my husband’s sister for dinner. She put out a spread of delicious food for adults but our child rejected most of it. (Curried fish, eggplant salad, quinoa salad etc.) Child wolfed down multiple pieces of a very crumbly bread loaf from a bakery.'
'Child knew that she was spilling some crumbs onto the floor beneath the dining room table but didn’t think much about it; we (parents) were in group conversation and did not notice. Admittedly, we could have and should have checked the floor afterward, noticed, and cleaned it up.'
'We thanked her and hugged goodbyes and left at 7. At 11pm, we get an email from her informing us that she discovered that (in her assumption) our daughter swept lots of bread crumbs from her chair down onto the floor, and that this is extremely unacceptable behavior and that SIL had to vacuum it up.'
'SIL would have told our child to vacuum it if SIL had seen it, SIL says this is not the first time she has observed our child leaving “garbage” on the floor without cleaning it up, this is completely unacceptable “(in MY home, at least.)” Moreover SIL wants to address this directly with our child in addition to telling us we need to correct this bad behavior. It was three paragraphs of histrionics over this, and no small amount of shaming us as parents.'
'We spoke with 7yo, who said she ate a lot of bread and knew it was making crumbs but she didn’t sweep them onto the floor, they just happened while eating. We spoke gently about being a considerate guest. No big deal.'
'I however was quite shocked and offended by the intensity of judgment and shaming in SIL’s email to us. I waited 24 hours then simply wrote: "Apologies. We spoke with her. Thank you."'
'Now husband is saying I “went nuclear” with my response and SIL is angry about it. It is true that that reply is a completely different tone and terseness than my normal communication style, and the terseness was intentional.'
'But why am I now the villain when, if anybody went nuclear here, it was SIL who flipped out over finding a bunch of bread crumbs on the floor under where a 7yo child sat at her table? Who is being unreasonable here?'
