AITA (Am I the Asshole)

I love the AITA string in Reddit (see HERE). I could read these all day and never get tired. It's amazing to me that there are people like those that are described here. 

I read one today, and it's very similar to aspects of my own family and the problems that we are forced to deal with. This might be a bit worse, but not by much!

Context: For every holiday, My mother would ask the women in the family (my sisters, sister in-law, my wife, my female cousins) to send "samples" of the desserts they plan to bring to the celebration for testing and to see if these desserts could make it to the "food menu". My wife has been complaining about my mother deliberately rejecting every dessert sample she sent. So many times my mother has told her that she's being honest and keeping the guests best interest at heart. Yet my wife still thought that my mother is deliberately excluding her since 2 of her dessert samples were rejected before.

For this year's Christmas my mother is doing the same thing but this time, she told every woman who are participating to make a "cookie sample" and send it to her for testing. My wife took it as a challenge and to be honest she worked really hard to make a good sample and sent it to my mother days ago and the results just came in yesterday.

I came home from work and found my wife upset. I asked what's wrong and she told me that my mother rejected the sample she sent and decided to exclude her baking from the food list/menu for christmas this year. I didn't know what to say but she then told me she was backing out of the invitation to attend christmas with my family. I was stunned when I heard her make this statement. I tried to talk to her but she said "it was done" I called her unreasonable to decide to bail on the whole family over some cookie sample...that's just freaking crazy and quite unreasonable. We had a full on argument about it and she stated that my mother caused this but I told her that my mother is pretty serious and careful about the food she offers to the guests since we are going to have relatives coming from all sides of country. She told me to stop mentioing it.

Later I heard her cry despite telling her that her baking is amazing and people have preferences that's all.

So, if I was going to answer this question . . . YES, this guy is an asshole. His mom is an asshole, but he hasn't fallen far from the asshole tree. The mom is an asshole because she's a bitch about her parties. Who does taste tests of food that people bring to a party? Fuck you, Mom. I would probably ambush my sample and make her sick on purpose if she did this to me. 

But this guy is a complete asshole because he's not sticking up for his wife. If I was this dude, I'd tell me, wife, to make whatever she wishes, and then I would take it to the party and force my mom to put it on the buffet. That's the only way he isn't the asshole in this story. 

It's good to hear that others have crazy people to deal with in their families. Soon I suspect I'll be posting my own on this string.