'AITA for excluding the 3 other women my dad knocked up and their children from my wedding?'
"AITA for only inviting my two sisters and brother to my wedding and nobody else in my family?"
TinyPerspective747 writes:
I (25m) am happily engaged to Clara (24f), and we're in the final stages of wedding planning. Invites were sent out recently, and as you can see from the title, this has caused some controversy. To give you the full context, I need to provide some background.
So, my parents had a unique situation growing up. Sorta like sister wives, but not sister wives. My dad had four women he would rotate around and knock up. With my mom, he had Jase (27m), me, Cassie (22f), and Robyn (20f).
Between the other three women, he had an additional 15 children. He's married to none of them, doesn't really live with any of them either, and there were a lot of breakups and makeups over the last 3 decades since this rotational thing started.
Sometimes it was presented like we were a big family, but typically the woman he was sleeping with at the time was meant to be someone all the kids gravitated toward, and we were meant to have one big sibling bond vs. bonds only formed with the kids who shared the same mom.
The three other women, other than my mom, are Ellen (7 kids with dad), Trina (5 kids with dad), and Elizabeth (3 kids with dad). Of the three other women, Elizabeth is the one who I think hoped all the kids would embrace her and look to her as a second mom.
She inserted herself into our lives in some weird ways at times. She also felt that because her kids had the smallest sibling group, they deserved more of us being close to them. Ellen and Trina didn't exactly mistreat us, but I'm not sure they wanted the "other" kids around either. But they had 7 and 5 kids, respectively, so who can really blame them?
It was rare for my dad to have all his kids under one roof. It did happen at times, but it was very rare. He was never a very good dad because he was always more concerned with his dick than his kids.
I'm close to my siblings. I consider my siblings to be Jase, Cassie, and Robyn. I really don't speak to anyone else anymore. Very rarely. My siblings are the same. We're not close to either parent or anyone else. So when Clara and I were figuring out our guest list, I told her my siblings were the only ones I wanted at our wedding, and they're the only people we invited.
Then mom found out via Robyn's Instagram about my wedding, and she told dad, who told his other families, and there are a lot of pissed off people who found ways to contact me and told me I should have invited them.
Elizabeth was just as upset and angry as my parents were. My mom asked how I could get married without her when she was the consistent adult in my life. I told her she brought us into a mess and willingly exposed us to that mess our whole lives. The messages got so annoying that I deleted a lot of social media. But the anger and frustration from them stuck with me a little and made me wonder: AITA?
Here are the top comments:
Analyst19 says:
NTA. Your wedding; your guest list. Hysterical phone calls and texts can be blocked.
fupyourcanoes says:
NTA. Everything you say here is irrelevant except that you only want to invite your siblings. It's your wedding. You invite whomever you want. Those are the rules. I invited only my husband's mum and stepfather to my wedding. Not a single person from my own family, no friends, none of his extended family.
We agreed that was all we wanted. It was lovely, and nobody dared to complain to us because his mum made it clear that this was our preference, not to exclude anyone, but to have a small, intimate ceremony with only people we both knew well.
FitOrFat says:
People like your mother, father, sister stepmoms and the multitude of half-sibs don't seem to understand the purpose of a wedding and the meaning of the word "marriage". Nor do they understand what a "committed relationship" is. You want a very different life than the one you lived growing up, right? Why invite people you are not close to who just don't seem to get that? NTA.
NotCreativeAtAll16 says:
NTA. For the last time, for everyone in the back, you don't have to invite anyone to your wedding just because someone expects it. Just like people are free to take that invitation and respond to it how they see fit.
What do you think?