Woman Won't Allow Husband To Go To Funeral Of The Baby He Fathered With A Mistress
This is a tough one.
Shutterstock A wife turned to Reddit to find out if she was in the wrong for keeping her husband away from the funeral of his child conceived with a mistress.
The subreddit AITA, short for “Am I the A**hole,” is a place for people to come and post personal stories that have been trying their consciences.
In the replies, other users of the site can give their opinions on the matter — also, they can vote to decide who in the story is in the wrong.
But when this troubled woman anonymously shared her story, many people weren’t sure what to do; although, many others had very strong opinions.
The woman posted anonymously of a close-held secret that had been guilting her.
Her husband, to whom she had been married 10 years, had an affair for about 6 months, before cutting it off after she discovered it.
Together, they did couple’s counseling and tried to work past the cheating and save the marriage.
Then, they discovered that he had gotten his mistress pregnant during the affair, and she was keeping the baby.
The wife wrote, “I understood that if she gave birth, my husband would have to do his part in supporting that child (at the very least, financially.)”
But the story turned tragic when the mistress’s baby was born stillborn. The wife wrote, “I wasn’t looking forward to this baby coming but I didn’t wish for this either.”
The wife wanted her husband to skip his child’s funeral.
The situation became more complicated when they received funeral details from her husband’s mistress for the child’s funeral, and the wife realized she did not want her husband to go to it.
She claimed, “He never got to meet this child and wasn’t even there at the hospital when everything happened.”
She went on to say, “If this was a child he knew at all, of course my opinion would be different.”
When she expressed that she did not feel comfortable about him attending, the wife shared that her husband had the idea of having her come to the funeral as well, an idea that she vehemently opposed.
“That’s a no. I obviously am not going to attend this funeral and make the woman and her whole family uncomfortable. Despite my disdain for her, I am not going to disrupt her mourning,” she wrote.
Then she explains just how few people know the secret — only her husband’s sister, her mother, and her mother-in-law — and she lists off their differing opinions.
Only these three people, she claimed, understood the situation. According to her, “[Her husband’s] sister thinks he should go to the funeral. My mother says if he goes I should divorce him. [Mother-in-law] refuses to comment on the situation at all.”
Finally, after presenting her complicated situation to Reddit, she left it up to their interpretation, asking, “Am I in the wrong?”
Reddit’s verdict was “NAH,” or “No A**holes Here,” but it wasn’t easily reached.
Many of the comments remarked that this woman’s situation was, “above Reddit's paygrade,” essentially avoiding giving definitive answers whether she was in the wrong or not.
Many others, however, were upset at these kinds of responses, and they tried to give her some nuanced answers.
And while many acknowledged that the husband is to be blamed for cheating in the first place, in this specific situation, they did not think either party was being excessively unreasonable, although almost everyone suggested that she let her husband go.
Many understood the wife’s feelings and didn’t jump to put her at fault, but these same people often urged her to allow her husband to go to the funeral, despite the difficult feelings.
However, of course, not everyone agreed. It seemed like the next-most popular opinion was that the wife was the a**hole, saying that allowing him to go to his child’s funeral would be necessary if she was really trying to forgive him and keep the marriage.
However, it seemed the majority was not willing to point fingers so aggressively over such a devastating story for everyone involved.
So, the verdict let the wife off the hook for this one, but it is unclear whether she went through with it after all the advice to let her husband attend. This is because she has unfortunately deleted her alternate Reddit account, with no updates given on the story.
Amanda Hartmann is a writer and editorial intern at YourTango who writes on entertainment and news.