Stepdad Upset That Stepdaughter Refuses To 'Clean Up His Messes' While He Works From Home
She's not even his daughter, let alone his maid.
Tima Miroshnichenko/Pexels A mom is being accused of "humiliating" her husband after asking him to stop relying on her daughter to clean up his messes.
Posting to the "r/AmITheA--hole" (AITA) subReddit, she detailed how she was struggling with how to navigate her blended family drama.
In her post, the mom described how her college-age daughter, who is in her second year at university, sometimes comes home to study for her finals.
Since her husband, who is her daughter's stepfather, works from home, he and the daughter are home alone together all day.
However, the stepdad has an unfair expectation of his stepdaughter.
The conflict arose because the woman's husband kept asking his stepdaughter to interrupt her studying to clean up after him whenever he makes a mess in the kitchen because he works from home and has meetings.
The mom writes that her husband and daughter have always gotten along well, and that they have "respect, understanding and trust" for each other even if they're not particularly close.
So she was surprised when they ended up in conflict with each other.
But her daughter came to her recently and let her know that her stepdad has been repeatedly interrupting her studies to ask her to clean up after him.
"She would stay in her room to study," the mom writes, "and at some point husband would knock saying 'Hey, I just had lunch, could you please clean up the table? I'm starting a meeting.'"
He has also asked her to clean up spills and other messes, always using a work-related excuse for why he can't do it for himself.
"She told me she feels like he doesn't care about her learning time and he doesn't acknowledge she is also working," the mom writes.
She also says her daughter said she wouldn't mind if it had been just a one-time request, "but it has became a habit of his."
The mom then asked her daughter to stop cleaning up after her stepdad the next time he asks.
She wanted to "catch" him in the act and confront him about his bad habit.
Sure enough, it worked like a charm. When she came home from work to a messy kitchen, she asked her husband about it, who blamed it on the daughter.
Worse still, her daughter was so swamped with studying that day she hadn't even used the kitchen herself.
"I jumped at my husband," she writes, "telling him daughter has exams and came here to learn, not to clean up after him."
The stepfather tried to defend himself by again using work as an excuse, but neither the mom nor the daughter were having it.
"I told him he could've [come] to clean up afterward," she says, but her husband still would not relent.
He told her that he thought it was "not a big deal for my daughter to spare a couple minutes" to clean up after him.
Understandably, the daughter responded, "If he thinks it could be done so quickly, why didn't he do it?"
To solve the conflict, the mom made a rule that everyone cleans up after him or herself, but her husband is angry because he says she "humiliated" him in front of her daughter.
Commenters were in almost unanimous agreement that the mom did nothing wrong.
Many felt the stepfather's actions and expectations revealed deeply held sexism.
One user wrote, "Wow... your husband is being very sexist and entitled. Why should your daughter clean up HIS mess. That's crazy!!"
And many weren't buying the stepfather's excuses.
As one Redditor put it, "Sounds like he has horrible (or excellent) time management skills if he can always just finish eating but just doesn't have the time to clean up after himself before his important meetings."
"Interesting that he has time to go to her room and ask her to do it though," another person added.
People were all around pretty shocked at the stepfather's audacity—and it struck one Reddit user as irritatingly familiar.
They quipped, "Is it me or does this remind anyone else of toddlers yelling for their mother to come wash them after they've pooped?"
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.