Imagine growing up in a family with parents who don’t really spend a lot of time with you. They send you to boarding school, and when you’re all grown up, they hardly even call you.

If you had big news to share, would you call them to tell them, or would you wait for them to call you?

In this story, one man is excited that his wife is pregnant, but he doesn’t want to tell his mom until she calls him. Now, he’s wondering if that’s unfair.

Let’s read the whole story to decide.

AITA for withholding my wife being pregnant from my mother/family

I don’t have a -bad- relationship with my family per se, but we really don’t talk very often.

I admittedly don’t try enough myself with my siblings, older sister and younger brother, but I have at least tried to keep something going with my mum.

I was sent to boarding school from 11-18, then went off to uni and dropped out moving fully out of my family home from the age of 20.

Communication was always sparse, and I think that was a taught behaviour as I got very little contact coming from my parents while I was at boarding school (full time with going home every 3-4 weeks for ‘exeat’ and half terms).

This is exciting news!

Anyway, skip forward, it’s my 33rd birthday today.

My wife is 15 weeks pregnant, and we’re really happy telling all her family (who I have gotten very close to).

However, I internally set my mum a challenge, that I will only tell her we’re expecting when she calls me.

This would be her first grandchild and I know that she’ll be very excited.

This challenge is really annoying to his wife.

I got a text from her today but no sign of a call or beyond.

My wife is now pressing me to at a minimum request my mum try and initiate more contact, which I think is probably fair.

Mainly I wanted to see if the general public thinks that my behaviour here is bad behaviour, that I should just start telling my family and not wait for this imaginary goal, or if there’s a minimum level of contact I should expect if she wants to be involved in my life.

He reaches out to his mom more than she reaches out to him.

Two things as an aside:

1) I haven’t told my siblings or my dad/step dad. The latter are realistically out of the picture, but I will be willing to tell my siblings soon regardless of if my mum calls.

2) counting up our calls this year, I have called my mum 18 times this year, she has called 4 times, the last time being in May, and 2 were call backs from me calling her first. This is something I have specifically asked her to work on a few times over the year.

It’s interesting how uninvolved his mom is in his life. I’m surprised she doesn’t call more. I think he needs to tell her the good news though. Maybe, as his wife suggested, he could ask her to call him.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

It would be a good idea to tell her simply to make his wife happy.

This person offers a suggestion about how to tell his mom.

Here’s another vote for telling his mom for his wife’s sake.

It could just be miscommunication. Maybe his mom doesn’t want to intrude.

His mom might not realize he wants her to call.

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.