A mother with a severe, lifelong cat phobia is devastated when her youngest son adopts a kitten.

When her other son defends the decision, she feels betrayed, leading to an emotional fallout.

Now, tensions are high, and the family is divided over whether the adoption was inconsiderate or simply inevitable.

Check out the details below.

AITHA for defending my brothers choice to adopt a kitten despite my mom’s cat phobia?

Context first I’m 33M, my mother is 60F and my brother is 24M.

My mother for as long as she’s had memory has a paralyzing phobia when it comes to cats and it get’s worst the younger the cat is.

If she sees a cat in the distance she freezes full stop, the closer the cat gets the worse she reacts,

If she doesn’t notice one walking up to her and it rubs against her leg (like cats tend to do) she literally drops on the floor and gets in fetal position, cries and will have nightmares for the next few days.

Ah, not your average “oh, I don’t like cats” situation.

I wish I was exaggerating but it’s true.

Just to conclude my mothers background she has never been controlling or narcissistic, that’s usually my dad.

But that’s another story.

My youngest brother (we’re three men) recently moved out of the house.

It was a pretty difficult episode for my parents since he’s the last to leave home.

Add to that the fact that my oldest brother lives in another country/ continent and I moved out of our home city after I lost my only child.

My parents at first took it personally against him and have been very opinionated regarding pretty much everything he’s done and have even called him ungrateful.

It got to the point that they disliked his GF because they felt like she was a bad influence (she’s not a bad woman, only different from my parents and that’s ok).

But eventually they got over it and even started to like his GF as well.

Until yesterday… my brother’s GF got him a cat about 2 weeks ago and my brother told my mother about 2 days ago.

And just like that, all that progress went out the window.

My mom called me and asked if I knew and said yes.

I didn’t tell her because it’s none of my business to do so.

She immediately got upset that we hid it from her and it got worse when I said that he’s probably not going to get rid of the cat because he’s already named him…

Apparently my brother told her that they offered him to adopt the cat but hadn’t decided yet.

So yay I outed him my mistake.

My mother started ugly crying and sobbing about how her children betrayed her and that now she can’t even visit her only son that lives in town.

The betrayal arc begins.

So I said that it is understandable that she’s upset but she can’t control whether what kind of pets he has.

At the of the day she’s the one with the phobia, not him.

That he hadn’t done anything wrong and was just living the life he wanted and he probably always wanted to have a cat, but couldn’t because he lived with her.

SHE GOT BIG MAD.

She started yelling at me and saying that I wasn’t being understanding and taking his side and I just said “do you think I wouldn’t chewed him up if he was doing something wrong?”.

Because I tend to be the one that reigns in my brothers from time to time.

The call ended up shortly after that and I called my dad to give him the heads up and he said that I messed up by upsetting her and that I could have handled it better.

That I should have been more understanding and he said that even if my younger brother didn’t do anything wrong technically, he was still a bit an a****** for getting a cat knowing how my mom gets.

So even though no one’s wrong…somehow, everyone’s a little wrong?

So just making my mother cry made me feel bad since she usually never asks anything of us.

But all this has me asking myself AITAH?

No one is entirely wrong, yet everyone seems a little wrong.

A personal fear, a new pet, and a well-intended defense have turned into a full-blown family crisis.

Most people on Reddit think Mom is overreacting and he is NTA.

This person says Mom probably has some control issues.

This person says she could even be a narcissist.

This person feels for Mom and her phobia but still can’t justify the reaction.

One kitten, zero villains, and a whole lot of chaos…

This mom is something else.

If you liked that story, read this one about grandparents who set up a college fund for their grandkid because his parents won’t, but then his parents want to use the money to cover sibling’s medical expenses.