Throw away and mobile. I (34M) don’t think I’m the asshole, but my mom said I’m lucky my wife (32F) didn’t crack me over the head with a frying pan, and my friend said I was being a dipshit. Thanksgiving is a big deal in my family. My wife is a pediatric nurse on a cancer ward, and works every other year and it’s 12 hour shifts, so even if she does stop by, it’s somewhat late. This year it’s her year to work. My dad mentioned to me over the weekend that they found it disrespectful that she only came every other year. I reminded him she was a nurse, but he said she knew how important Thanksgiving was to our family and how she should work something out because our traditions are her traditions now. I agreed with that. I mentioned trying to get every Thanksgiving off to my wife and she said it didn’t work that way schedule wise, and that even if she could get this year off, that would mean she’d have to give up Christmas and that’s the holiday that’s a big deal in her family.
The conversation didn’t end there, though. When I told her that my dad felt “disrespected,” her face went from tired to completely blank. She sat down at the kitchen island, still in her scrubs, and asked me very slowly if I truly believed that her “tradition” should be to abandon her own family’s Christmas and her professional obligations just to satisfy my father’s ego. I doubled down, fueled by my dad’s voice in my head, and said that since she joined our family, the “big” holidays should center around our main gatherings. I told her that a “good wife” makes sacrifices for the family unit. The silence that followed was heavy enough to sink a ship. She didn’t scream; she just stared at me like I was a patient who had suddenly lost all cognitive function.
The Weight of the Ward
The next morning, the tension was palpable. She left for her shift at 5:30 AM without saying a word. I spent the day stewing, talking to my dad on the phone. He kept egging me on, saying that if I didn’t “put my foot down” now, I’d be playing second fiddle to her job for the rest of my life. He made it sound like a power struggle—him versus her—and I was the foot soldier. My friend, the one who called me a dipshit, tried to talk some sense into me over lunch. He pointed out that my wife spends her days making sure kids with terminal illnesses have a chance to see another Thanksgiving, and here I was complaining that she wasn’t available to eat turkey at 2:00 PM on the dot.
When she came home that night, she didn’t go to the kitchen. She went straight to the shower and stayed there for forty minutes. When she finally came out, her eyes were bloodshot. She told me that one of her favorite patients, a seven-year-old boy who had been fighting neuroblastoma for two years, had taken a turn for the worse. She had spent her entire twelve-hour shift holding his mother’s hand while the doctors discussed palliative care. She looked at me and said, “While I was watching a mother realize her son won’t see his next birthday, you were texting me about your dad’s ‘disrespect.’ Do you have any idea how small your problems are?”
A House Divided
Instead of apologizing—which is what a sane person would have done—I got defensive. I told her that she shouldn’t bring the “gloom and doom” of work home to win an argument about family. That was the moment my mom’s “frying pan” comment started to make sense. My wife didn’t hit me, but she did tell me to sleep on the couch. She said that if I wanted to be a part of my father’s “traditions” so badly, I should just move back in with him since I clearly didn’t respect the woman I actually married. For the next three days, we were roommates who didn’t speak. I felt like I was standing on “principle,” but the floor was feeling increasingly shaky.
My dad called again on Wednesday to ask if she had “seen reason” yet. I told him we were fighting, and he actually laughed. He told me to “stay strong” and that she’d eventually realize that the husband’s family comes first. But then my mom took the phone away from him. I could hear her yelling in the background before she put the receiver to her ear. She told me, in no uncertain terms, that she had raised me better than this. She said, “Your father is an old-fashioned narcissist who thinks the world revolves around his dinner table. If you lose a woman as hard-working and loving as your wife because you’re listening to a man who hasn’t worked a holiday in thirty years, you deserve the divorce papers she’s probably drafting.”
The Reality of Professional Nursing
That was the “Aha!” moment. I realized I wasn’t fighting for “tradition”; I was fighting for my father’s approval at the expense of my wife’s sanity. I started looking into how nursing schedules actually work in a high-acuity ward. It wasn’t just “asking for a day off.” It was a complex system of seniority, holiday rotations, and safe staffing ratios. If she took Thanksgiving off, someone else’s wife, mother, or daughter would be forced to work an extra shift. It was a zero-sum game. Moreover, I realized that I had never once offered to miss my family’s Thanksgiving to go to her family’s Christmas. I was demanding “equality” that was entirely one-sided.
| Conflict Point | My Father’s View | My Wife’s Reality |
| Attendance | Mandatory for “respect.” | Limited by life-saving work. |
| Priority | His traditions are the “main” ones. | Both families should matter equally. |
| Flexibility | She should just “work it out.” | Rigid hospital safety mandates. |
| Sacrifice | Wife should sacrifice for husband. | Marriage should be a partnership. |
The Attempt at Repair
I spent Friday evening cleaning the entire house and ordering her favorite takeout. When she walked in, I didn’t wait for her to speak. I told her I was an idiot. I told her that I had let my father’s outdated ideas about “disrespect” cloud my judgment of the incredible person she is. I told her that from now on, our tradition would be whatever worked for us. If that meant having “Thanksgiving” on a Tuesday because she was off, then we’d have the best Tuesday turkey in the state. I also told her that I was going to tell my dad to back off, and if he couldn’t respect her career, then I wouldn’t be attending his “disrespectful” dinner either.
The look of relief on her face was worth more than any family heirloom. She told me she didn’t want me to skip my family’s dinner, but she needed me to be her shield. She needed to know that when she was at the hospital saving lives or comforting grieving parents, her husband wasn’t at home complaining about her absence to people who didn’t understand the cost of her service. We sat down and looked at the calendar together. We decided that we would host a “Friendsgiving” or a “Second Thanksgiving” on her next day off, and that would be our new tradition.
Moving Forward
It sounds like you have a lot of bridge-building to do, both with your wife and with your father. Standing up to a parent who demands “tradition” over “humanity” is a major milestone in adulthood, but it’s necessary for a healthy marriage.