A Woman Sent Her Brother An Itemized List Of The Things Her Nephew Has Destroyed
Her brother wanted to know why his 10-year-old boy was not invited back but his daughter was.
Reddit is backing up a woman who refused to include her young nephew in her plans because he’s an “uncontrollable kid.” However, her brother wasn’t too fond of the idea.
In a now-viral post shared in the Reddit “Am I The A**hole?” thread — under the username u/Educational-Aide-572 — the woman explained that her brother’s kids, Michael, 10, and Bella, 7, are like night and day when it comes to their demeanors. She explains that Bella is calm and mature while Michael can be a bit of a handful.
For context, she explained that when her nephew had been over at her home previously, he poured her entire nail polish collection onto her wife’s favorite silk Persian carpet.
The original poster (OP) said that she and her wife bought a new house out of town with a pool, a game room, and a rose garden. She asked her brother if they could have Bella over for a visit. Her brother informed the OP that she and her wife needed to invite Michael, too, or Bella wouldn’t be coming.
“[My brother] got really mad at us and said it was disgusting that we favored Bella because she was a girl and that we were both hypocritical and unfair to Michael, and never included him in our plans,” she wrote.
“I told my brother that Michael was an uncontrollable kid. He had the audacity to ask what Michael had done. I told him I’d let him know (I’ve told him the items over the years as it happened but he always said it was an accident and that Michael’s a boy and boys play rough). I made a table including every item my nephew damages in our house and the estimated cost,” she continued.
In the (very long) list of things her nephew has destroyed, she wrote down her wife’s antique vases, her glass statue of the Eiffel tower, the carpet, several of her wife’s crystal decorative items, and two phones that he flushed down the toilet.
“Even the mirror of my car. I sent the list to [my brother],” she continued.
“He is now extremely angry with me, and thinks I am being an arrogant person, and taking after my wife’s trait of being an uptight rich kid. I am not talking to him at the moment. Was what I did AH territory?”
The post blew up on Reddit, receiving over 13,000 upvotes and over 1,500 comments.
The top comment read, “NTA. He asked, not your fault he doesn’t like the answer.”
Another joked, “I grew up with five brothers, Michael has broken more stuff than we all did combined.”
One user noted, “No way what you did was [A**hole] territory. I thought maybe you’d kept a list of everything he’d broken next to your heart to bring out at all times. He opted to play dumb, so you were 100% right to bring up every situation you could remember at that point.”
Another user suggested that these dueling siblings find some sort of middle-ground, noting that the destructive behavior of Michael really lands on the parent.
“Seems like the easiest solution would be to say, ‘Michael can come, but you need to come too, then, and be responsible for making sure nothing gets broken,” they wrote.
Even if this kid is just “being a kid,” it’s on the parents to make sure that their kid, first off, doesn’t come into people’s home and immediately begin causing terror and, secondly, make sure that if there is damage done, it’s paid for. The OP’s brother asked for examples, and she gave them to him.
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