It is a truth universally acknowledged that any redditer turning to AITA (Am I The Asshole?) subreddits for advice must be in want of exoneration from strangers on the internet.
And often they’re likely to get it - remember the woman who wondered if SWTA for walking out on her cousin’s wedding 25 years ago after it transpired that he’d wife-swapped his bride weeks before the nuptials with his mistress, without telling anyone?
Not the asshole, lady.
Not so for one redditer who asked, ‘AITA for refusing to pay my BIL [brother-in-law] for babysitting my daughter?’
The OP (Original Poster) set the scene by explaining that his wife was dead and he was a single father who relied on his in-laws for support. So far, so reasonable, right? But as we know the title of a subreddit is unlikely to give away the whole story (which is perhaps what makes it such compelling reading - the drama! The plot-twists! Euphoria could never) and went on to give a detailed account of why they the OP was, in fact, TA.
‘Some days ago, I had an appointment with the dentist and the babysitter who was supposed to watch my daughter called and cancelled, I didn't know what to do so I called my BIL asking if he was willing to watch his niece til I get back from the appointment,’ they wrote. God, is there anything more annoying than having arranged childcare fall through last minute?
‘He said he wasn't sure since he had a couple of tutoring sessions to get done. I told him to skip and dropped my daughter off at his apartment then left.’
Right. So now we learn that BIL has work commitments and income at risk which OP demands he ‘skip’ before lumping the daughter on him without his assent. OP went on to express their outrage at BIL asking for reimbursement for the money he’d lost from cancelling his tutoring sessions and even questioned if he was joking before positing that paying him for his time would ‘set the precedence for him to keep expecting money every time’.
‘AITA for not paying him?’
As commenters rightly pointed out, family does not equal free labour - even if it’s a standard we often hold mothers to - and OP had obviously expected to have paid for childcare when a professional was taking on the job. While the patchwork of childcare in the UK is time and time again proven to be unfit for purpose and dentists appointments are certainly not easy to reschedule in this time of austerity + long backlogs, a simple solution to OPs predicament would have been to agree - nay, offer – to cover the cost of the money sacrificed by BIL losing out on work.
Of course, family is important and BIL no doubt loves getting to hang out with his niece, but it’s not a privilege to provide last-minute childcare, particularly when it comes at a monetary cost. During the pandemic we’ve seen mothers lose out on income as the burden fell on them to bare the brunt of looking after kids, usually at the expense of their jobs, when their usual childcare - school, nursery or playgroups – were out of action, and while it’s an issue Grazia’s The Juggle campaign has been dedicated to platforming, wouldn’t it be hypocritical to suggest the same shouldn’t be said of BIL in this instance? Far from being ‘greedy’ and ‘an opportunist’ – two terms bandied about by OP in his search for vindication – BIL was merely making it clear that his time and resources are at least worth the money he’d lost out on. It’d be unlikely to ‘set a precedent’ for expecting cash for childcare if the childcare had been agreed upon and planned in advance, and OPs presumption that BILs job was less important than their dentist appointment and their expectation he would be willing to drop everything for his niece would probably disincentivize BIL from agreeing to any babysitting in future, anyway.
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