Planning birthday events can be tricky.

What to do, who to invite, who not to invite.

You don’t want to offend anyone, but sometimes you have a particular vision for your birthday – one that others might not agree with.

When this happens, do you stick to what you wanted, or do you bend to others’ wishes?

In this story, a woman in her twenties is faced with exactly this predicament. The culprit: her mother in law.

Read on to find out what happened.

AITA for telling my MIL I don’t want to spend my birthday with her?

So my 23rd birthday is coming up and I’ve been planning to spend it with just my husband (24) this year.

This has been planned for a while, because last year on my birthday we had my immediate family and the in-laws round.

My mother-in-law got quite drunk and made a scene about how my husband and I aren’t the “right fit for each other.”

She ended up shouting some pretty bad things specifically directed towards me.

Uh-oh, bad mother-in-law alert. Let’s find out what happened next.

The context for this is that she’s been very hot and cold on her opinion of me.

She said that she didn’t like me when me and my husband were dating, but has been more or less okay with me since.

My birthday last year was the worst of it, and I wasn’t going to continue making a scene over it because I’m stuck with her for life.

I don’t want us to have a bad relationship, especially because my partner and I are planning on having kids soon.

Read on to find out how this affected this year’s birthday plans.

This year I talked to my husband and we decided that instead of doing anything with the family, we were going to make plans for ourselves.

We decided on ice skating (as we did on our first date) and going out for lunch, followed by some of our favourite movies and junk food for dinner.

We figured that we could go out for a family dinner with my immediate family and the in-laws the weekend after or something.

Recently I told my in-laws about our plans, and now my mother in law is insisting that they want to come as she did a lot of ice-skating when she was younger.

I appreciate her enthusiasm, but I really wanted to spend this day with my husband, especially because we’d planned it for so long.

Let’s see how the husband responded.

He says that he’ll back whatever choice I make but that it wouldn’t be unreasonable to let the in-laws come to the ice skating and lunch, and then do the rest ourselves.

I originally asked to speak to her in person about it in more depth, but she told me that she was too busy and didn’t want to.

I feel a bit torn because I don’t want to hurt their feelings, but a part of me is saying that she’s just trying to make it about herself again.

That being said, I know that might be unfair.

AITA?

So she wants a quiet birthday, just her and her husband – but her mother in law just wants to be involved.

Let’s check out what the people of Reddit thought of her predicament.

This person was firmly on the birthday girl’s side.

This person agreed, and thought the husband needed to take more of a stand.

Meanwhile, this Redditor suggested she should be more selfish about her celebrations.

Others agreed, suggesting firmer boundaries might be in order.

The couple might want to keep the mother in law on side so that she can help them when their future children come along.

But if she doesn’t stand her ground, her mother in law will be walking all over her forever.

If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parents’ 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.