Reddit Stories - EXPECTING spouse decided to act as a melody to our OFFSPRING, but PRESENTLY

Episode Date: April 28, 2026

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #parenting #familydynamics #relationships #communication #expecting Summary: A couple expecting a child faces challenges when one spouse decides to embody a melodic persona for their offspring. This decision creates tension and misunderstandings, leading to discussions about parenting roles and expectations. Ultimately, they must navigate their differing approaches to ensure a harmonious family environment.Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, parenting, family, relationships, communication, expecting, melody, offspring, challenges, dynamics, expectations, harmony, discussions, roles, tension, misunderstandingsBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6816713/support.This episode includes AI-generated content.

I hope you enjoy this story. Expecting spouse decided to act as a melody to our offspring, but presently she is requesting me to dispatch my two youngsters elsewhere for 12 months in order for her to concentrate solely. On our baby, and expects me to make it work financially. I, 35M, have been with my wife, Ollie, 37F, for two years, married for one and we are expecting our first child together in a few months. I also have two children, 8M and 6F, from a previous relationship with Alex, 32F, and we have 50 to 50 custody, however, Alex travels a lot for work so we have the kids more than that most of the time, so we get child support from her. Before we got married, Ollie and I spoke extensively about what we wanted, and she was adamant about being a stay-at-home mom.

I was upfront with her that I was fine with that, we'd be able to afford it, but she would need to be a song. for all of the kids to be able to make it work. She agreed happily. So as you can probably predict, she sat me down the other day and told me that she wants, at minimum, her first year as a mom to only be a psalm to our shared baby. She said after that she can help out more with the other kids, but wants to protect her first time motherhood and said it's her number one boundary.

I told her that would no longer work. Then, I couldn't support a family of five on just my salary without help with all of the kids. She said I needed to figure it out and respect her boundaries, but this simply won't be possible. We have family to help for sure, but she's saying she doesn't want to be responsible for the older kids at all the first year. Also, we want at least one more child and I'm now worried she'll try to extend the year with another baby. She's incredibly hurt and angry, but I don't think it would even be possible to respect her boundaries. So would I be the asshole for reneging on my promise to let her be a stay-at-home mom? Quick edit. My ex-wife will be keeping the kids for two weeks after birth and has been able to be assured she wouldn't travel for that first month of emergencies come up.

I am also paying the person I currently am who picks up, watches, drops off, etc., the kids before and after school an additional four weeks after Alex already has them for six full weeks off from any older kid duties for Allie. Comments where OPP has replied, comment one. NTA. Your kids are in school most. most of the day M. F. I'd assume that gives her nine months to have the days with her baby and evenings and weekends she'll have your help. But I'm more concerned about the dynamic she's setting up. Her baby versus your kids. Your children will feel this dynamic very deeply, if they don't already. She will make them feel like outsiders in their own home. She will

make them feel like this baby isn't really their real sibling. This has disaster written all over it and you need to shut this down immediately. You're headed for another divorce, I'm afraid. Her mask has slipped. Oh, O-op, I agree, and it's so far out of left field. She loves the kids and they love her, she always loves doing things with them and planning activities. I wouldn't have married her if she didn't like REM comment too. NTA. Aren't the older too in school? So realistically she would have the entire school. day just her and the baby. She's being ridiculous. She can either enjoy several hours each day alone with her kid and parent her stepchildren after school is agreed, or she can put her baby in

daycare and miss out on all those hours while she gets a job. Oh-op, yes, but they need to be taken to and picked up from school slash taken to their activities while I'm at work. I currently pay somebody to do this but with a new baby and without her salary I won't be able to. Edit, Stop asking about buses. This is a private school, no buses. Last edit, X pays for the school tuition and I would never take my kids out of a school they love just so she could be a stay-at-home mom to one out of three kids. Comment three, she needs to see the math and know that what she wants is not possible. She also needs a dictionary because that not a boundary, it's a demand.

A boundary is not something that can dictate anyone else's behavior. OOP, yes I have shown her the numbers, but she wants me to make it work. OOP on Ali's ideal plan for being SOM and not taking care of the older kids OOP. She doesn't want to do any child care for the older kids for a year. She is getting six full weeks off from it after birth, but after that yes, doctors. Visits, school pick up and drop off, and child care during and between those times I'm expecting her to do OOP shared his thoughts and options he has given Ali OOP. Yeah. I've basically confronted her and told her that her options are, she keeps working, I'm willing to support her

for her 12 weeks of unpaid FMLA, but after that the baby would go to the, not free but heavily subsidized, daycare on site at my work, and everything else stays the same. She doesn't go back to work, and we continue paying the nanny who takes the kids to slash picks up and watches the kids after school. However, this will take up all of her fun money I have allocated in our new budget. Right now she waits tables some weekends and evenings to make extra money, I'm fine with her continuing to do that to make money for the extra stuff she wants to buy. Thanks to all the comments on Reddit I told her I'm not longer comfortable with the idea of her being a psalm to my kids, she can work on rebuilding that and I know my kids still love her but a lot of comments open my

eyes. She's completely devastated and even tried arguing that I should stop putting money into my kids' college funds so as not to take away her fun money, or even more deranged, asking my ex-wife to take the kids out of their private school to save the money we pay towards it, uniforms and activities. Just the idea of asking that for my ex is insane. So she's currently being pretty cold towards me, not the kids though, and I'm just so over it. We have a therapist appointment Tuesday, so hopefully that will help, but she's really fucked with my trust in her with this. Additional information from OOP, just a quick note Alex pays me child support, she makes quite a bit more and since she travels so much,

I always agree to have the kids if she's not in town during her parenting time. Once or twice I haven't been able to sew either her husband or my parents haven't taken them. Update, I posted on another sub, but they locked and removed it for violating a rule that honestly I don't think it did so Y Ollo. You can find the other post on my profile but the gift of it is that my wife Ali and I had multiple discussions about her being a psalm to our future kids in addition to my two kids from my previous marriage to Alex, however she recently told me that she wanted the first year of our upcoming baby's life to be just a psalm to the baby, and I told her that wouldn't work for me or our budget. I talked to Ali and laid everything out.

I told her that her demands were out of line and incredibly entitled, and that if she insisted on keeping them, I was no longer comfortable with her quitting her job and would not support it. Further, two weeks without my kids was ridiculous, so I told her that if she went into labor during our custody time, my parents would have the older kids when we were in the hospital, but I am not longer comfortable sending my kids away to their moms for two weeks. Other families don't normally do that and I would not either, but for the first two months of us having the baby, I would keep paying the nanny and take care of the older kids things, which is longer than I had originally agreed. Honestly, it was also more than she'd even originally agreed to, so I thought it was a fair compromise. She lost her mind and flipped out at me, told me that I wasn't respecting her first-time

motherhood, WTF, and that she shouldn't have to care for kids I didn't give birth to for the first year of her baby's life. I was honestly over it at this point and done arguing, I told her she needed to check herself and that none of this was new or a surprise. If she didn't want to do it, she shouldn't have agreed to it, and her being a stay-at-home mom was off the table. To be clear, I know I could make it work with just my salary. But it would mean taking the funds I would allocate towards her fund money for things like

shewing, self-care, etc., and I'm not comfortable telling an adult dependent on me financially that she couldn't have a choice for fun money. I showed her the budget, which backfired because she said that I didn't need to defund her fund money and gave me a few solutions which were, take the older kids out of private school and ask my ex to give us that money and child support instead. Stop putting money into my older kids college fund, selling my boat those were her solutions.

None of which ever sacrificing anything, only me and or my kids, and the first one was so unreasonable I could only imagine how that conversation with my ex would go. She'd laugh me out of the country, L.O.L. I told Olly all of that was unreasonable, and a non-starter, and honestly just made me see where her priorities are. So yeah, I told her that if she couldn't agree to common-sense compromises I could no longer trust her to be a psalm to our older

kids, that there was zero daylight in how much I cared about my older kids versus our shared baby and had to protect them both equally. The fact that she thought it was reasonable to stop saving for my older kids college while still giving her money for Botox and highlights showed me where her priorities would lie if she no longer brought an income. I said I was no more. I was no longer comfortable with her quitting her job, and that since my work has, not free but heavily reduced, daycare on site, that would be the best option for our family after her FMA leave, she doesn't get paid maternity leave, just unpaid up to three months which will be fine. She's devastated and being cold towards me, but surprisingly not my kids which is good.

I don't want to kill her dreams of being a psalm, but I can't work with someone who refuses to be reasonable. We discussed it with our therapist last week, who wasn't exactly on my side obviously but was trying to point out the unfairness, and she just keeps saying she needs me to prioritize her needs and boundaries. The therapist even tried explaining that these are not boundaries but she's not listening. Edit to add one quick thing, I've known Ollie since freshman year biology. We never dated until a few years ago, but we've always remained friends. I have known her and this behavior is all so new. She loved being a bonus mom, would be excited for the kids to come over for extra time, and would even ask me to ask my ex if she could have them randomly if she wanted

to take a day off and go swimming or to the zoo or something. I've asked her for all to her doctor about this and she's yelled at me about it. I have no clue to what to do. Next story, Dad paid for our dream holiday but made inappropriate comments about my body, told me he doesn't wear underwear while packing, and booked us a one-bedroom apartment where he said he'd be naked at night, so I abandoned him at the airport. My dad, 52M, had planned a holiday for him and me, 26F. He had paid for the holiday and said it was his treat and given me spending money. The plan was that I was to fly over to meet him in his home country and spend a few days with him and my granddad before flying out for the two weeks of holiday. The next day when we got the flight he had a few drinks before we got on

the plane as he is a nervous flyer. I decided to just have a few Diet Coke as it was too early for me to drink. When we got on the plane he took the window seat and I sat in the middle seat. Then a man I'd never met was on the L seat and his family were across the aisle. In front of us were a family, mom, dad, and young child, maybe about three. Before the plane took off, 4.5 hours' flight, he was talking a lot about the physics of planes and what can go wrong. The man next to me told him you're going to scare your daughter and my dad kind of joked it off and then continued.

During the safety briefing he kept talking over it and prodding me when I was trying to listen. Then not long into the flight he kept talking about physics and telling me how his chat GPT says he's supremely intelligent and he struggles because nobody he talks to can keep up with him. I wasn't really listening much TBH as every time I tried to talk he spoke over me or undermine me and I was tired and kept having to take my headphones. out and put my book down to be polite. But physics is his interest, I'm more into poetry and literature. As he was talking he was pointing on the chair. The mother of the child in the seat in front of us politely turned around and let him know that he was disturbing their little girl as every time he did that, the chair would shake

and she was trying to sleep. He apologized and then a few minutes later he was doing it again. So she asked politely a second time. Then he dropped one of his headphones and when he dropped one of his headphones and went to stand up to look for it, as he did he used the chair in front of him to help himself up which in turn woke the little girl up. The father of the child stood up and said to him we've asked you three times now, she's awake now, please can you be considerate of who is sitting in front of you, he was polite about it, my dad then very loudly shouted fuck you, and went on a rant

to the father of the little girl. He was quite aggressive and uncomfortable for everyone around TBH. There was a lot of swearing too and he was very loud. The other guy didn't entertain it and just said to him, are you done? And then sat back down. My dad starts ranting to me about it very loudly and it was obvious he wanted the guy to hear. Then my dad says to me, do you agree? But I didn't, I personally thought the way he acted was awful. So I'd said to him I think you were harsh as it was the most gentle way I thought of to say it. My dad responded to this by saying how dare you sighed with other people over me and I told him that I was entitled to my opinion. He then told me that we can go on separate holidays in that case. I angled myself away from him

and he started ranting at me again about that. But I kind of just tuned him out at this point as I didn't want to speak to him. Then I put my arm up to kind of block me from his view to which he said, have you got your arm up to block me out? And I just said yes because I didn't want to lie to him. He ended up dropping his headphones again and then couldn't find them so he come out of his seat to go and speak to the air hostess. When he was away, someone had asked me if I was okay, but I struggled to regulate my emotions due to borderline personality disorder and autism, so I ended up bursting into tears which I felt bad about because it was the family in front of me that he was the most horrible to, so I didn't really have a right to be that upset.

Then the man next to me told me not to let him bully me and told me where they were staying and if I needed help or there was bother that I could go there. When my dad come back I felt really uncomfortable and he was giving me silent treatment and I ended up with really shaky legs and I couldn't breathe. My dad ignored me but the very nice man next to me helped to calm me down and then was asking me about my book and he showed me his Kindle and what he likes to read. My dad ignored me the rest of the flight but I had to ask him if he could move over a few times as I was sat kind of scrunched into my book. myself as it was, but he kept spreading his legs wide and was in my space which I didn't want. He went to snap at me when I asked the second time, but he managed to stop himself. It was like a four-hour flight and when we landed I booked myself a flight home and then told him I was going home. He wasn't happy about that, but I just kind of went silent after I

told him as I didn't want to argue. The other family of the man next to me let me get off in between them so that he wasn't right behind me when getting off and took me to collect my bag and told me where I needed to go for departures. Then I saw the mother of the little girl and apologized to her and told her that her and her child and her partner didn't deserve to be spoken to like that. When I'd collected my bag I got a text from my dad saying he was stranded and that his wallet and his headphones and his tobacco had been taken. At first I thought maybe it was security because of how he was acting on the plane so I replied and said who. And then he called me to go and meet him which I did. He said he'd been robbed and the people

in front of him had been sliding his jacket from under the seat and taking things out of his pocket. But the seat in front of him was the little girl. He said that's why he was kicking off and that I was siding with them and talking to them through the flight. I said I didn't talk to them at all during the flight and I was talking to the man next to me. He said that they were all together but they didn't seem to be as they didn't really ever interact and were collecting bags separately. He said there was CCTV and the police were involved. I don't really think his story adds up as his headphones were one of the things he said were stolen, but he had them after he was shouting at the family in front. I said to him, I'm sorry you were robbed, but

you were unkind to me and I didn't do anything wrong. And he started ranting about how he was robbed and I was siding with them again, so I just walked off and haven't seen or heard from him since. That was two days ago now. I feel quite bad as he was excited for the holiday and worked hard to pay for it for us to have a nice time away. And if his headphones and cash have been robbed that is very sad. Ida for going home because of this and bailing on our holiday. Update, thank you for the advice on my last post. I have spoken about this with some people I trust and they pointed out some things that were often after thinking about it I am glad that I didn't go. I will list some things that made me uncomfortable about my dad and the situation

that I think may have influenced my decision. Based on thinking about these things, I have also decided to go no contact with my dad. However, it has been a week now since I walked off in the airport on the holiday and I still haven't heard from him anyways. My friend said I should add a TW for abuse one. Once he was texting me and kept joking about ordering condoms and batteries for me and I said why, so he told me it's not weird your dad ordering you something to give you pleasure, is it?

And I told him to stop because he's not. funny and then he said it'd be in heaven and screaming in pleasure when the parcel came and to make sure to send a vid. I said that it was making me uncomfortable and he said he's my dad and would never mean what I thought he did and that it was chocolate and called me a dumbass. Two, he kept making sexual comments about women around me and told me he likes curvy women of a certain dress size. My friend pointed out this is my dress size and it's weird that he said that so now I've realized maybe that is weird. 3. The sleeping arrangements for the holiday were that it was a one-bedroom apartment and I'd take

the bedroom and he'd take the sofa so I could have privacy but he warned me that when I was in the living room on a night that he tends to kick his clothes off so to look away if I don't want to see him naked for. My friend said he was quite mean to book a holiday that I probably wouldn't enjoy as I get anxious and don't leave the house a lot so would probably have stayed inside all the time anyways. She said he should have booked a Canard cruise which was the same price as what he paid as my special interest is ships and I know that when I am on Canard ships I feel safe to enjoy myself as I know my way around and am more confident and able to get out around the ship. Especially as people on Canard ships speak English and people where we were going don't.

I think maybe he just didn't want to go on a cruise and I didn't pay for the holiday so it wasn't my decision, but I have listed this anyways because apparently it means he wasn't priority. my wants. Five, the hotel we were staying at was quite isolated and didn't have a 24-hour man reception desk and was run by one man on his own six. He kept interrupting conversations and staring at me just to tell me you're so pretty which was nice at first but a bit much after a while and I don't respond well to compliments anyways. When I was packing his case I told him he'll have to pack his own underwear and he told me he doesn't wear them eight. He made a joke about his penis to one of his friends while I was in the room nine. He said he packed a big chef's knife

ten. He kept bragging he slept with an American NBA cheerleader who wasn't much older than me 11. I like to dress up and wear long vintage style dresses and dress modest, but he kept telling me not to pack those things and bring shorts and tops instead because of the heat, but I really don't like wearing those things at all. When he saw how packed my case was and that I'd brought lots of long dresses he got angry with me for packing impractical clothes. 12. He kept snapping at me the day before we went for doing things wrong when I was packing his case or changing his betting 13. Always talked over me and didn't let me talk about what I wanted and when I talked about things I knew about he undermined me even though he'd never known about

these things before me. Fourteen, kept talking about segs with me and joking about me riding fellas even though I said I don't like being touched by people and also I don't really want a boyfriend at all 15. He kept joking about wearing speedos and covering himself in oil and becoming a stripper while we were away. These are just a few of the reasons and I know I am probably being very dramatic but I think they made me feel a bit icky really so I don't want to talk to him anymore.