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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/vegantroubles1234 on 2023-07-30 15:02:31.

Recently I [F25] finished my degree and my parents offered to host a small dinner with my closest family to celebrate this. I appreciated the help so I didn’t need to worry about it during the last stressful weeks of university.

I have been vegan for 6 years and my parents are ok with it at this point, but not thrilled by any means. When we have family dinners my parents usually cook meat for everyone and I either cook up some meat substitute from their freezer (they keep some for when I visit, which is nice) or I just bring my own meal. They have a handful of times cooked an entirely vegan meal for everyone. They can make great vegan stuff, though they think it’s a bit trickier and don’t know many recipes.

I tend to try to avoid talking about veganism with my family since I don’t want to make them uncomfortable and I’d rather focus on the things we have in common when we hang out. We’ve had some conversations about it though and they know that seeing meat makes me sad and think about the death of the animals, but again, I don’t tend to remind them of this regularly since I don’t want to be rude or be a party pooper.

When my parents offered to host my graduation dinner, I assumed that they would understand that I wanted the whole meal to be vegan. But at the graduation dinner, I notice my mom preparing meat in the kitchen. I asked her if they were gonna serve meat tonight and she said yes, and the plan was to give me some frozen falafels and vegan burgers like I usually eat at our family dinners. It made me sad that I was getting ready-made things from the freezer when everyone else got a home cooked meal at a dinner that was supposed to celebrate me, and I told her that. My mother was very apologetic and started to prepare falafels and burgers to everyone, putting the meat aside. She said that they hadn’t thought much of it since I usually don’t complain when they eat meat and I got freezer stuff. I thought the explanation was a bit weird but I appreciated her trying to fix things and calmed down.

Then my dad got into the kitchen and my mom explained to him what had happened. He got defensive about it and wasn’t apologetic at all. We had a bit of an argument and I started to cry. My sisters saw this and both chimed in, saying that they also thought it was weird. My dad just got quiet and gave up. The rest of the evening was nice but I could tell my dad was in a bad mood.

The next day my dad calls me up and wants to talk about the dinner. He said that what happened was my fault, I can’t expect people to read my mind and that he was just focused on trying to get food on the table and didn’t think about my veganism. This just made me more sad because I didn’t feel like I did anything wrong, but I’m starting to think that he may be right and can’t expect non-vegans to understand that something like this would make me upset.

Edit: fixed formatting