Crazy cat lady alert!

If you invite someone who doesn’t have kids but does have cats to a baby shower, you just might get an ear full of how cats are like kids. At least, that’s what happened in this story!

One woman called her cat lady sister out on turning every topic back to her cats, but she’s wondering if that was the wrong thing to do.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for telling my sister that having cats is not the same as having children?

I (26f) have a sister that I’ll call Jenna (23f).

We’re not extremely close, mainly because she was always closer to our younger brother (22m), but we still see each other pretty often.

Last week, we were both invited by our mutual friend that I’ll call Mary (25f) to her baby shower.

The baby shower was super fun and it was a great occasion to reconnect with some friends from college that I hadn’t seen in a while.

Everything was going wonderfully.

A few guests were giving Mary advice.

Towards the end of the baby shower a lot of the guests had left and Mary, my sister, 2 other friends and I ended up talking for a while.

Those two other friends both have children, and I have a daughter, so we were all giving Mary advice, telling her what to expect, and talking about baby stuff.

Jenna was the only one in the group who didn’t have children and wasn’t expecting, so I guess she was feeling a bit left out.

Because of that, she kept talking about her experience as a cat mom.

Here are some examples of experiences she insisted were similar to having cats.

Every time someone would tell a story, or talk about something they experienced with their children, she’d say that she experienced something similar with her cats.

When we were talking about how being a parent can be exhausting she kept talking about how having 3 cats was also hard work.

No matter what we said, she was always bringing it back to her and her cats.

At one point, one of my friends was talking about how much responsibility it was to raise children, and Jenna just replied “Having cats is a huge responsibility too!”.

That started an argument.

I simply told her that that was not really the same thing and she got really defensive.

She said that it was the same thing, and started to talk about all the ways that having cats can be demanding and a huge responsibility and said that we were basically shaming her for not having children.

I tried to tell her that it wasn’t an insult and we weren’t saying that it wasn’t demanding or anything, but that you can’t compare having pets and having children.

I have both cats and a baby, and it’s nowhere near as exhausting to have a cat as it is to have a baby.

She’s wondering if she messed up.

She said that we were disrespectful and invalidating her experience and didn’t talk to us again until we left.

She hasn’t talked to me since.

I get that she was feeling excluded from the conversation and maybe tried to find a way to insert herself in it, but also I feel like it makes sense for us to be talking about children since it’s a baby shower.

Maybe I shouldn’t have brought it up but I also don’t feel like what I said was really wrong, and I’m feeling like she might be overreacting a bit.

But I don’t really know how to feel about it so I thought I’d get another perspective on this.

Maybe Jenna felt left out, but she shouldn’t have brought up her cats so much. It’s a baby shower, not a pet adoption party.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Someone with kids and pets weighs in.

Another person defends the sister.

This person is on her side.

Another person is on her sister’s side.

Cats and babies are very different.

That said, they could have included her sister more.

If you liked this post, you might want to read this story about a teacher who taught the school’s administration a lesson after they made a sick kid take a final exam.