Woman Wonders If She's Wrong For Insisting Her Sister Stop Fostering Dogs & Help Care For Her Kids Instead
She feels way too entitled to be able to do this.
otsphoto / Shutterstock.com A woman with four kids of all different ages from 11 months to 10 years old is having a bit of an internal conflict as she struggles with taking care of her kids alongside her own personal issues.
Luckily for her, she’s been able to lean on her kind, caring, and overly-generous sister who sometimes babysits and helps her out with taking care of the children.
Unluckily for her sister, she leans a little too hard on her and when she started fostering dogs too often and couldn’t help her with the kids, she tried to tell her to stop.
Now, the mother is wondering if she was wrong for asking her sister to stop fostering dogs to help with her kids.
The best place to figure out if you’re wrong without any bias is by going on Reddit and making a post about it so all sorts of internet strangers can see it and share their thoughts.
The subreddit “r/AmItheA--hole” (AITA), was quite literally made with this express purpose.
People post about their experiences, share their stories, and ask if they were really the “A--hole,” to the end that the Reddit mob will weigh everything out and decide a rating to give you: “You’re the A--hole” gets you a “YTA,” and “Not the A--hole” gets you a “NTA.”
At the end of the day, you will be judged, and this woman was not judged too kindly.
You see, her sister’s passion is fostering dogs — housing them until she can find someone to adopt them and then continuing the cycle.
Over the years, she has fostered many dogs, but more recently, she has fostered four dogs (not at the same time) which she said could not be around her sister’s children, ultimately making things harder for the mother.
After the most recent dog, the mother received the news of another dog.
“My sister proceeded to tell me that there was a second dog that desperately needed a new foster, so she planned to take in that one as soon as her current dog was gone,” she wrote.
“So, she couldn’t do any more babysitting than she already is (sometimes she comes over to my house in the morning to help out).”
This made her “stress levels spike,” and that was when she told her sister about the trouble she was having when she had gotten the first dog they were discussing.
“Then I asked her, point blank, to not get another dog,” she wrote.
The root of this post and the question she asked and everything this story was culminating in was about this question, right here.
She knows that fostering dogs is her sister’s passion, and yet, she asked her not to get another dog for her own selfish reasons.
“Above all, my kids will always come before a dog and that’s the reason I was willing to request it,” she wrote.
However, she doesn’t realize that her sister’s own desire and will outweigh whatever request she wants to make.
She does share, however, how she feels trapped in all of this and the reasons behind her struggles.
“I don’t have anyone else to help me. I can’t afford a babysitter long term, and my friends all have their own kids to look after,” she wrote, also adding that her “husband doesn’t help as much as he should.”
Many people took issue with that as well, wondering why she hasn’t addressed the situation with her husband instead of trying to force her sister to do what she wants.
Unsurprisingly, the verdict was YTA.
She also fails to recognize that she chose to have these four children outside of her means and that she put herself in this situation.
None of it should be placed on her sister and she’s fortunate to even have the kind of relationship she has with her.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.