A Woman’s MIL Shamed Her for Not Reminding Husband About Family’s Birthdays & Why Is It Her Job Anyway

This mother-in-law thinks it’s her son’s wife’s job to remind him about family birthdays, so she asked the internet to weigh in

Another day, another story about a useless man who thinks his wife is automatically his personal chef, maid, secretary, and handler. In today’s edition, we’re heading to the always hilarious-yet-rage-inducing “Am I the A**hole” subreddit, where a woman is asking the internet to weigh in on her fight with her mother-in-law over whose job it is to remember family birthdays.

“My MIL’s birthday was about two months ago. They live on the other side of the country, so it would typically mean a phone call and maybe a birthday card. Well, I guess my husband forgot about it and didn’t call her or send her a card,” she writes. “I found this out because she called and was disappointed that she didn’t hear anything from us. I told her that my husband probably should have put her birthday in his calendar and set a reminder, and that he never does.”

AITA for not reminding my husband about holidays, birthdays, anniversaries, etc?
byu/Quiet-Guidance inAmItheAsshole

She continues, “She asked me why I didn’t keep track of this stuff for him, because ‘he’s a guy, they don’t care about that stuff.’ She mentioned he’d skipped his sister’s birthday and niece’s and nephew’s birthdays too, and that I should start trying to remind him. And then she said ‘And don’t forget Mother’s Day, either.'”

The wife, who has the patience of a saint, says she’ll talk to her husband. But that’s not good enough for mother-in-law.

“She got annoyed and told me that like it or not, it’s kind of ‘my job’ to keep track of this stuff, because again, guys don’t care,” she says. “I said ‘Well, if he doesn’t care, he doesn’t care. I’m not his mom.'”

To no one’s surprise, husband took his mom’s side.

“He said that we’re a team and that he’s obviously not good at this, so I should step up,” she writes. “I asked him what the release date for a video game he’d been talking about was. He said the exact date. I just looked at him for a minute, and he got pretty defensive and said ‘That’s totally different.'”

Right.

So the wife came up with a great solution: she and her husband would start a shared family calendar with important dates like birthdays entered in, with reminders. That makes sense, right? Except, of course, husband couldn’t be bothered to pull his weight, once again.

“I started the calendar, entered in my dates, and it has been sitting there, unused for the past two months. What happened? He missed another birthday, and the whole thing started again,” the rightfully frustrated wife writes.

So amid this ridiculous war with her husband’s family, she’s asking the internet if she’s the a**hole in the situation. The internet, thankfully, sees reason, and the response is overwhelming: she is not. Obviously.

“I hate this stuff, the mental work load that is automatically assigned to women. You’re his wife, not his secretary. Also nice move with the video game date. A wonderful comeback would have been ‘Oh you’re right, it is different, you actually care about the game,'” one commenter wrote.

Another weighed in, “Send him back to his mother so she can finish raising him.”

This scenario is all-too-common—research shows that in heterosexual marriages, it is virtually always women who do more child-raising, housework, and mental and emotional labor, even when both parents work full-time jobs. And husbands (and MILs) like this one are only perpetuating that problem.