Woman Asks If She Should've Used A Softer Approach After Giving Her Pregnant Sister A 'Reality Check' About Raising A Child
She felt that her sister was a bit naive about the realities of what would happen once her baby arrived.
PRPicturesProduction | Shutterstock A woman questioned if she was being intentionally cruel toward her pregnant sister about the realities of being a parent.
Posting to the subreddit r/AITA, she claimed that her 23-year-old pregnant sister doesn't seem to understand how drastically her life would change once her baby arrived and attempted to give her a bit of notice.
She asked if she should've used a softer approach after giving her sister a 'reality check' about raising a kid.
In her Reddit post, she explained that her sister recently visited her and revealed that she was pregnant. This caught most of their family by surprise because they didn't even know that she had been seeing someone. Since the pregnancy announcement, her sister had pretty much moved in with her and decided that she wanted to keep the child.
"I told her I would support her. It was not planned at all, and she said there was almost zero chance she would get pregnant," she wrote. "I have been helping her plan for her life now. I told her that I would help her with money, but it was going to be very tough to raise her kid on her own."
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A little while later, she broached the subject of who the father of her sister's baby was, but her sister just brushed it off and said that the child didn't have a father. She didn't press her sister about it, figuring that she just didn't want to talk about him, and he must be someone toxic.
However, from the way that her sister would sometimes mention him, it didn't sound like that at all. In fact, her sister spoke highly of him, and it was clear that she really liked him. Despite her sister's intent, the woman kept asking if it was the right thing to do to ice out the father completely.
"I honestly don't know," she wrote. "I have never met this guy and she thinks highly of him but also doesn't want the guy around. I don't want to prod, but she keeps changing her mind."
During another conversation where her sister repeatedly asked what she should do, the Redditor ended up snapping at her from exhaustion after hearing the same question over and over, giving her a bit of a reality check. She told her sister that since she was going to become a mother, she needed to focus on what was best for her child and not what was best for her as the parent, and she shouldn't be making life-changing decisions based on her personal feelings for the baby's father.
Her husband thought she was being too harsh on her sister.
"She started to cry and was silent for a while, she then said she really needed my help and begged me to not stop helping her and I said I wouldn't abandon her," she continued.
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However, her husband wasn't impressed by the advice she gave her sister.
He claimed that she was being overly harsh on a 23-year-old first-time mother and should have chosen a softer approach. Since their talk, her sister has been avoiding her a bit, and now she feels as if she'd been unintentionally rude.
It can be difficult bringing a child into the world with a partner who you either aren't romantically involved with anymore or have mixed feelings about.
On one hand, you may want to protect your heart and feel that while that person may not have been the best partner, they won't make the best parent, but a man has the right to at least decide if he wants to be a part of his child's life.
Withholding that decision from him can create resentment, especially for a child who has to grow up in a single-parent household when the outcome could've been different. What he chooses to do is up to him, and she can't control his actions and whether he wants to be involved or not, but he should at least be given the opportunity to make that choice for himself.
Her sister will know that she at least tried, and she won't have to live with the regret of never having given him the chance to be a part of their child's life.
And when her child grows up, they will know that every effort was made to have both parents in their life.
Nia Tipton is a Chicago-based entertainment, news, and lifestyle writer whose work delves into modern-day issues and experiences.