August 6, 2025 at 11:15 am

Her Estranged Mom Wants To Come To Her Wedding, But She Told Her She’d Have To Pay To Attend

by Matthew Gilligan

Shutterstock/Reddit

There are some people out there who suffer from what we like to call “Main Character Syndrome.”

In short, it means that they think everything in the world revolves around THEM.

And it sounds like that’s what this woman is going through with her mom.

The situation involves her wedding, and whether or not she wants her mom to attend.

Is she the jerk in this story from Reddit?

Let’s see what’s going on here…

AITA for asking my mom to pay to attend my wedding?

“My (f28) mom chose to abandon her parental rights when I was 10 months old to be with a man she met and moved states away.

She came back into my life when I was 4 (they broke up) and was in and out of my life my entire childhood.

When she would come back into my life she was extremely abusive both emotionally and physically.

My father was also not perfect, he was an alcoholic, I had been put into foster care a few times, and my mom never showed up to any of the court dates.

Things changed when she was 14.

When I was 14 she found God and remarried an extremely hardcore religious man she met at church.

Her husband has always disliked me, told me that I couldn’t live with them because I didn’t follow the path of God. They’ve never helped me with anything financially, she never even paid child support.

Fast forward to two years ago, her and her husband have had 3 daughters (aged 12, 10, and 7 as of right now) my mom asks me to buy her restaurant for $25,000.

What a horrible mother!

It started to get to the point where she was begging me, trying to tell me that it was a great business investment, that she had so many offers and wanted to keep it in the family. She said I would be making $100,000 a year.

She didn’t know her husband had texted me months earlier saying that their business was failing, and he wanted me to help them turn their business around.

I told her I was sick of her only contacting me when she needed something.

She then had my sisters to call me and leave me voicemails asking why I was ignoring them and wouldn’t come visit.

She’s getting married.

I got engaged in June of last year and my fiancés family offered to put in $15,000 for the wedding, my dad matched that and my fiancé and I are putting in around $10,000.

My fiancé has a huge family and I only have about ten people on my dad’s side.

My mom found out about our wedding from Facebook and offered to fly out my aunts, her daughter, and both of my grandparents.

They all live in Thailand so I was really grateful to be able to have them there, I’ve always had a pretty good relationship with them and wouldn’t be able to afford to pay for all of their flights here without her.

I was ready to bury the hatchet just to have them attend.

There was a big problem.

My dad’s family made it very clear that they didn’t want to pay for her and her family.

I asked her if she could pay for just herself, her husband, and her family and she told me she could only give me $1,000 because she has to pay for her kids’ private school.

With catering, bar, and rentals everything ends up being around $200-250 a person. When I told her this she said that I should expect that everything else would be paid off by gifts from guests.

She’s wondering what she should do.

I don’t want to seem ungrateful and selfish for telling my own mom and family that they can’t come to my wedding because they won’t give us enough money, but I really don’t want to have other people (especially my father) pay for her to be there when she’s never helped me with anything in the past.

AITA for telling her she can’t come unless she gives us more money?”

Talk about a lot of wedding drama!

Here’s what readers on Reddit had to say about this.

This person said she’s NTA.