Source: Reddit
My brother and his husband recently adopted their son. It was kind of sudden, the baby dropped at the fire station sort of situation. I had known they were in the process of adopting, but as far as I knew they were kind of early on. I don’t know anything about the process so I guess I thought a pregnant woman looked through stacks of applicants, picked some family, met with them, and they went to the hospital to get the baby when it was born. Basically I thought there would be a lot of lead up to them becoming dads and I would have a heads up.
So my bro had called me last week and said, “congrats you’re an uncle! You have a little nephew.”
And reflexively I just said, “oh nice, did you get a dog or a cat?”
My bro was silent for a bit and I was thinking that’s not a hard question? And he finally says, “a human baby, we adopted a baby boy…”
And I was like, “shit sorry, that was fast.”
My mom was absolutely HORRIFIED at this story and I’ve been deemed the biggest family AH this year over it. My brother doesn’t seem mad, his husband seems to be very annoyed with me. No one understands why I would ask that, so I mean, idk, am I an AH here? I’m not neurotypical, so it’s hard for me to know if maybe they’re teasing me and not actually that mad. However, if this situation needs a real sit down kind of apology for me being a major AH then I want to do that.
Update. Whoa this blew up overnight.
I talked to my brother and BIL this morning and I told them like what I said here and I apologized. They said they are not mad at all and they thought it was funny. They said if they seemed upset it could be because a lot changed suddenly for them. So I think I could have misunderstood them being busy and tired for being annoyed.
I asked what about the pause on the phone, because to me if someone takes longer than about 1 to 2 seconds to begin speaking after I speak, and especially if I count over 5 seconds, then probably that is confusion or surprise I believe. My brother said he wasn’t sure if I was attempting a joke and he should laugh or if I was confused, that’s what he was thinking in the pause. The family likes to tease me because when I learned about sarcasm in 1st grade I then tried it out and told my dad I had a terrible day at school when he asked (trying to be sarcastic) but my inflection was wrong so he thought I was serious… my brother was trying to figure out if that kind of thing was happening again.
But, as it turns out, actually no one in the family is mad at me. They apparently are all poking fun and I couldn’t tell. My mom’s reaction was apparently not horror in an angry way but in a funny disbelief kind of way. I feel a lot better about it now.
Here are a few comments on the story where it was originally posted:
