Kate Hackett
u/UnderstandingOk1255 recently wondered, “AITA for doing the same thing to my sister-in-law that she does to my son?” and I think once you read through her story you’re going to jump to the same conclusion I did — let’s take a look.
OP outlines that her brother is married to “Sarah” and they do not have kids yet. OP does have kids, a son and a baby daughter. They live in Belgium but sometimes visit England.
So background: I (32f) have a brother, “Dave” (35m), who’s married to “Sarah” (29f). They don’t have children yet. I have a son who just turned four and a three-month-old daughter with my husband (39m). My husband and I live in Belgium most of the time, but we travel back to visit my family about once a month (in England).
They speak English and French to the kids. The boy will sometimes mix up the two languages, which is not unusual at all.
At home, we speak both English and French to our children (my husband is Belgian), and right now, my son is in this very sweet phase where he’ll sometimes mix up the two languages and say a couple of words in English in a French sentence or vice-versa. This has never posed a problem to us, and even the staff at his nursery have reassured us that it’s very common and they tend to grow out of it once they start at school.
However, Sarah, the SIL, decided it’s an issue and very rudely corrects the 4-year-old.
My sister-in-law has decided that this is a problem, so when we’re visiting my parents and she notices my son doing this, she’ll correct him, but she does so really rudely, whereas my husband and I will just gently correct him.
Now, she’s elected to simply ignore the kid when he makes the mistake.
Anyway, we’re visiting at the moment and she’s now decided that instead of correcting him, she’s just going to start ignoring him when he does this. I sort of noticed her doing it when we arrived, and I thought it was odd, but assumed maybe she was just stressed (her job is quite intense), but it only really became an issue yesterday.
OP let it go until she realized that her son asked for a drink and the SIL ignored him entirely. When OP asked why, Sarah replied that OP shouldn’t ignore speech issues.
My husband was talking to my dad outside and I was feeding my daughter in the other room, and I’d left Louis with Sarah and Dave. When I came back downstairs, Louis was crying, and I managed to understand that he’d tried to ask Sarah for a drink (he has a special cup he uses that he was holding, so it was obvious what he meant) but that she’d just ignored him. I asked her why and she explained that she wasn’t going to reply to him unless he said the sentence correctly and that I shouldn’t be “ignoring my son’s obvious speech issues.”
OP clarifies that the SIL knew what the son wanted, she was just deliberately ignoring him.
For context, it’s not that she didn’t know what he wanted. She told me that she understood exactly what he was asking for, but that she was deliberately refusing because he hadn’t asked correctly.
OP was furious but had some time to calm down. At dinner, however, OP decided to ignore her SIL when she used slang.
This really pissed me off, but luckily my husband came inside at that moment and pulled me away so we could calm down and settle Louis. That night at the dinner table, Sarah asked me to pass her something, but she said it in “bad” English (she IS English, I just mean that she asked for it in slang. Think, “Pass usthe peas, will you”. I had a bit of an epiphany and I just decided to totally ignore her. She asked again, and I did the same thing.
She threw the SIL’s words and logic back at her and says it was childish, but was still mad about Sarah being a jerk to her kid.
My brother asked why I was ignoring his wife and I said that I’m not able to reply if she can’t speak English correctly and that it’s wrong of him to ignore her obvious issues with grammar.
Everyone’s pretty pissed off with me and I admit it was incredibly childish, but she was needlessly being a dickhead to my baby.
Should I just apologise?
She adds some edits thanking people and explains that she decided she will not be apologizing and she will likely never leave her kid with her SIL again.
Edit: WOW this really blew up. Thanks for all the comments and support, and thanks for all the ESH/YTA messages too. I’m not going to apologise to her, because, to be quite frank, I think she deserved it, but I will have a conversation with her and my brother before we leave to try and explain that, for one thing, it’s completely normal, and, more importantly, that if she keeps correcting or ignoring my son, I’ll be severely limiting their contact. Although I doubt if I’ll ever leave him alone in a room with her again anyway.
She also explains that her husband was entirely on her side.
To answer a few of the most common questions: When I said everyone was mad at me, I meant my brother, his wife and my parents (although, my parents don’t agree with what Sarah’s doing either. They’re more trying to “keep the peace”). My husband is entirely on my side, and when he realised what Sarah had done to Louis (he only saw the aftermath), he wanted to cut short the trip.
OP details some of the reasons why she thinks the monolingual response was so severe as well as why they head to the UK so often.
Sarah (and the rest of my family), only speak English, which I suppose goes some way towards explaining why she doesn’t understand it. I do think it’s a monolingual reaction because we’ve never experienced anything similar in Belgium.
One final thing – lots of questions about why we’re in the UK so often. My husband has to be in London for his job about once a month/ once every six weeks, so we tag along. I freelance, and a few of my clients are UK based, so it’s a good opportunity for me to fit in a few meetings too. It also gives us the chance to bring Louis and Misha over to see my parents before Louis starts school, and we have to cut down on the visits.
So, clearly NTA. Petty, maybe, but NTA at all. Reddit agrees with me:
