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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/chinchillina on 2024-06-28 23:07:34+00:00.
I am NOT OOP, OOP is u/Educational-Meat8359
Originally posted to r/AITA_WIBTA_PUBLIC
Am I the asshole for letting my daughter keep her room?
Original Post: June 21, 2024
My (47m) daughter Stacy (15f) has one of the two rooms in my house with an ensuite bathroom. It’s a largish room with a nice bay window, obviously very nice.
I’ve recently become engaged to my girlfriend of 3 years, Alice (33f), and her landlord has recently hiked her rent, so we’re planning to have her move in with me. She has some kids. She has Two daughters (13F,10F), and two sons (11M, 9m). She is also pregnant, with our daughter due in about 5 months.
I’ve made it absolutely clear to my daughter, as a condition of getting her approval on moving my girlfriend in, that she is allowed to keep her room, and she is also allowed to have a full lock on her door. For what it’s worth, I also got my son’s (24m) blessing to give away his old room, although that’s more of a moot point, as he lives with his own girlfriend now. My daughter plans to go to school locally, and I have told her in no uncertain terms that she’s welcome to live at home for the rest of my life, and after that she can inherit the house. I bought the house with her mother and paid it off in large part with her mother’s life insurance 10 years ago, so it only seems fair. She says she’s all right as long as she has her room and her bathroom and she’s allowed to put a lock on her door. She has a toaster oven and a mini fridge in there, so I guess she’s pretty well set up.
Stacy will be giving up a room that she’s currently using as a studio/project space(she does art, videos and voice-overs etc) so even her larger room will become a bit more cramped, and she’ll definitely need the extra space she has.
There will be a bedroom for Alice’s girls, Stacy’s old project room, and Alice’s boys will be getting my son’s old room. I’m going to be putting in a finished nursery /bedroom in the basement for our new daughter.
Alice thinks that this is unfair. She thinks it was wrong of me to make the decision without her, and she also thinks that she should move her two daughters into Stacy’s room, and that Stacy should have to move to the smaller room that they’ll be getting. The two of them already share a smaller room than the one I’m moving them into as it is, so they are getting an upgrade regardless. Alice thinks that it’s not fair for Stacy to have a bathroom all day herself and that there won’t be enough bathrooms for everyone else. She also disapproves of Stacy being able to lock everyone out. There were other smaller things she didn’t like that I agreed to with Stacy, like the fact that she is to be paid for any babysitting, or the fact that my older car, her mom’s old car, is hers when she gets her driver’s license.
We’ll have our own bathroom in the master bedroom, and the house has three other bathrooms besides, one on each floor, one near what will be her girls room, one not far from what will be the boys room, and one little basically be directly next to the new finished room.
I told Alice that my deal with Stacy is non-negotiable; set in stone and that it’s literally a condition of her even moving in. Alice is upset that Stacy and I both have spaces completely dedicated to ourselves. I have my office, which I need because I work from home and have projects besides, and there aren’t a whole lot of other spaces to put people. I told her she can pretty much do what she wants in the living room, but that it is what it is and there’s pretty much nothing to be done about it.
A bigger house is not an option unless Alice is going to start making a hell of a lot more money and buy her own bigger house. It’s already a pretty big house, and housing is expensive. I told her that she’s already getting a break by my only expecting her to contribute 15 or 20% to household bills. If we were doing it proportionately, it would be more like 25 to 30%. We keep separate finances, and we’ve agreed to a prenup.
Alice just seems upset that I won’t change the setup even though there’s no real way to change it, and she’s accused me of treating Stacy like a “spoiled little princess” and letting her be “queen of the house”.
Frankly, my daughter comes first, she’s lived here all her life, and I already know it’s going to be a big adjustment having all these other kids move in. As much as I love Alice and as much as I want our relationship to work out, if it’s a matter of choosing between the two of them, then my relationship with Alice is a sacrifice I’m willing to make. I’ve told her that if she comes into this with wicked stepmother vibes, and that’ll be the end of things. She thinks I’m being unreasonable.
AITA?
UPDATE: June 22, 2024
I got a lot of eye-opening insight and advice from my post, so I feel it’s worth giving everyone an update, especially considering developments.
First, to address a few questions that seemed to keep coming up before I lost the ability to read each and every reply (although I’m still trying)
My son (24m) is my child from a previous relationship before I met / married my late wife. He has his own provisions in my will, but he’s quite aware that the house goes to his sister.
My own sister is to become guardian of my daughter if anything should happen to me. I love my sister as dearly as I love anyone, and she and her niece love each other and get along great. I trust her completely if, God forbid, anything should happen.
Yes. The basement is an unusual place for a nursery, but I was just trying to make people fit where they could go. The move was supposed to be happening within a month, and Alice’s older kids needed rooms now. Meanwhile the baby isn’t going to be born for about 5 months, so she could go into the room that isn’t made yet. I honestly figured we could keep a crib in our room for a bit, and after that it’s no big deal for a kid to have her room in a finished basement. Also honestly, I didn’t want to move my office. It’s been where it is forever and I didn’t want to move it. I can admit that. We’ve had the beginnings/groundwork of a finished basement since forever, but there was never any reason to really put a move on it. It was a big change to go from having more room than we need with just me and Stacy rattling around in the house to suddenly scrambling for space and to not having enough. It was the obvious spot where an additional bedroom could go, but not a spot where a bedroom is now.
Alice and I had talked about marriage and children more or less in the abstract on many occasions, and we both wanted to get married, at some point, if things continued to work out, and I wanted to have more children, although this pregnancy was quite unexpected.
It was Alice’s pregnancy combined with the rent hike on her place that accelerated the timetable on things. For what it’s worth, the rent hike is real. I’ve seen the paperwork. And I have literally no reason to suspect the baby is not mine.
But yes, the only reason why we got engaged so recently is because Alice got pregnant. The only reason why Alice and her kids would be moving in with me so suddenly is because she was likely to need to move somewhere, and I’d obviously like to be responsible for / be near / raise my coming daughter. To me, it made sense for my daughter to live with me. I never wanted to be an absentee/part-Time parent or to not have time or share space with my child.
The circumstances all made sense, at least until now.
I was definitely wary of Alice and paying more attention to her, especially after the many many comments that I read. I came to Reddit to get a sanity check on whether or not I was being an asshole about my conditions with Stacy, not to try to actually make any kind of major life or relationship changes. But I didn’t want to turn a blind eye either.
It was Friday, and Stacy texted me, asking for her allowance. I was with Alice at the time, and I went ahead and let the subject come up.
I give Stacy $100 a week. Alice thinks that this is “crazy” and “excessive”. She thinks it’s improper, and she’s brought it up as an example of how she thinks I’m raising Stacy like a “spoiled princess”. She said as much again when I told her I was sending Stacy her allowance, but this time Alice also asked if her kids would get the same allowance after we get married. I told her that someday our new daughter would probably get an allowance just like Stacy does, but that there was no way I had any plans of shelling out an extra $400 a week for her other kids.
Alice got upset. She said that Stacy waste my money on shoes and makeup (she has previously criticized Stacy for wearing fancy sneakers, high heels, and makeup), and she said that I was showing favoritism and that that is a form of abuse. She complained about me letting Stacy buy things with my credit card and store my credit card on her phone when I don’t even let Alice do that. She said that whatever money was going to go to the kids should be split evenly amongst them.
When I shrugged and told her that that wasn’t g…
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Alice got upset. She said that Stacy waste my money on shoes and makeup (she has previously criticized Stacy for wearing fancy sneakers, high heels, and makeup), and she said that I was showing favoritism and that that is a form of abuse. She complained about me letting Stacy buy things with my credit card and store my credit card on her phone when I don’t even let Alice do that. She said that whatever money was going to go to the kids should be split evenly amongst them.
When I shrugged and told her that that wasn’t going to happen and that I wasn’t going to cut Stacy’s allowance, she snapped at me and said that a man living alone with his daughter and doting on her like I do is “creepy and incestuous,” and she said “You’ve just replaced your dead wife with your daughter, and you need to stop.”
That was it. Sure. I’ve ignored a lot of red flags up till now, but that was it.
She started trying to tell me about how it’s unhealthy for me to be so close with Stacy and how she didn’t want her kids to be neglected, and how she wanted to be treated as an equal if we were getting married, but I interrupted her and I told her that I don’t think we should be getting married.
I told her that I don’t want her moving in and that we were going to need to work something else out.
To be perfectly honest, my sister, my brother, and some of my friends have expressed some of the same misgivings about Alice that I’ve read, although they were generally a lot more gentle about it. I was in love with her. In fact I’m still in love with her, and I wasn’t seeing things clearly.
I told her that I would always and definitely make sure that our child had a roof over her head, but that she was going to have to work something out for herself and her kids on her own.
Obviously, we had a huge fight. She screamed at me. She called me a heartless bastard. She blamed Stacy for trying to sabotage our relationship. She guilt tripped me about her cost of living and how I’m in an empty house all by myself. She also guilt tripped me about the stress on the baby, and I actually do feel bad and worry about that.
She eventually broke down crying and told me to leave.
In the past 10 years, this was the first relationship with a woman I’ve had that became “serious”. I love her, and this hurts. It hurts a hell of a lot.
I told Stacy that she didn’t have to bother moving her stuff out of the other room, that Alice wasn’t coming, and we hugged. She asked if this was her fault, and I told her no. I told her I honestly feel like marrying Alice would have been a mistake even if the two of them could have been best buddies.
I always wanted to have a few more kids, and I’ve missed having a wife, but things don’t always happen the way we want.
So I’m pretty sure my relationship with Alice is effectively over, even if we’re going to be raising a child together for the foreseeable future.
My new daughter can have my son’s old room whenever we work out whatever custody agreement we end up working out. I’m not sorry to be having another kid, even if I really wish the circumstances could be better.
The red flags were always there. I guess it’s better that I noticed them now instead of even later.
Stop getting pregnant before serious talks dumb dumbs! Keeping a child is a choice (unless in red state). All a child is going to do is make things worse just like it did here. Should have had an abortion and commit to a child AFTER proper discussions. I hate the whole “oh I’m just trying to take responsibility” how about showing it by not bringing another human life into chaos.
