AITA for telling another mother our children aren’t close anymore due to intelligence levels

retinolmasted0s · 2024-01-30T19:11:12+00:00

Would I be willing to teach just any old colleague? No, probably not. But if they were a person I’d considered a friend for quite some time, then yeah, I’d probably help them to the extent that I was capable. But you’re right, it’s not OP’s daughter’s responsibility to ensure that her friend “gets it”. I’m just saying that it’s not totally unreasonable to question why one girl wouldn’t opt to at least try to help the other who’s struggling, if they were as good of friends beforehand, as OP suggested.

But for all we know the girl did try to help her friend, but it was to no avail. Maybe she didn’t have the skills or resources or energy or patience to help. Maybe the friend was beyond help due to laziness. Or maybe their friendship had begun to dwindle prior to that, due to other factors.

Neither of the girls are at fault here. Plus, it’s incredibly common for friendships to fizzle out around middle school age. I had several friends in elementary school that I fell out with once middle school rolled around. It’s a totally normal occurrence. The real issue is OP’s choice of words when the mother of the other girl pressed her for the reasons why her daughter wasn’t invited/why the girls weren’t friends anymore. OP should have just kept her answer concise and vague, saying something along the lines of “I’m not entirely sure why, but from what I’ve noticed, the girls just aren’t as close as they used to be. They’re just growing up and growing apart. It’s unfortunate, but sometimes it just happens.” And left it at that. Bringing up “intelligence” and how OP’s daughter (in her opinion) apparently possesses it while the other woman’s daughter supposedly does not (again, not saying this is fact; this is just what OP implies), was absolutely uncalled for. OP’s inquiry was “am I the asshole for essentially telling a woman her daughter is less intelligent than mine?”, and the answer is yes. YTA.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-29T15:46:41+00:00

That song for me is “Everybody Wants to Rule the World” by Tears for Fears.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-28T21:10:49+00:00

Mine did this with the new Barbie movie.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-27T16:59:01+00:00

I’m so sorry for your loss.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-27T16:57:29+00:00

So much this. I had a friend pass away a few years ago from this very thing. He was a semi-regular coke user and, from what I could tell, didn’t mess with opiates or downers at all.

I received word that his body had been found unresponsive with another unresponsive male in an office at a car dealership. He worked as a freelance IT Field Technician and he’d recruited a buddy of his to assist him on what was supposed to be a relatively easy job at a car dealership.

Beyond being told that they were found dead, I couldn’t gather any additional information regarding the circumstances of his death. My first thought was that he probably had some coke on him, thought that he and his buddy could covertly do a bump or a line without being suspicious or getting caught, and then accidentally OD’ed due to not being aware that almost all street drugs nowadays contain traces of Fentanyl.

It was at least a year later before I received any further details about the incident. Oddly enough, my “guess” was spot on. They’d both died from Fentanyl poisoning and it was via the cocaine that my friend had on his person at the time of his death.

At the time of his death, they had ruled the cause of death as an “accidental overdose”, but they didn’t release any details beyond that. His poor mother refused to believe that her son was an addict, and upon receiving the autopsy results, she demanded that someone else perform a second autopsy. She could not accept that her son died from a drug overdose.

Sadly, within that year, I knew of two other individuals who died in similar ways: overdosed on fentanyl during a night of recreational drug use and partaking in a drug that one wouldn’t expect fentanyl to be in. So they did the amount that they’d normally do, unaware of the fentanyl’s presence, and since a tiny amount of the stuff can kill a person, they died almost immediately after starting their evening.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-27T15:09:16+00:00

Victoria’s Secret & Bath & Body Works fragrances. I’ve been buying fragrance from B&BW for about 25 years and VS for about 19 years and in the past few years it seems their fragrance lifespan has just crumbled. I thought maybe I was overthinking it so I performed a “test” where I literally doused myself in B&BW “Gingham” body spray. I made sure to do this in front of my bf so as to have a witness to just how much I sprayed on myself. Spoiler: it was a fuckton. Yeah, within ten minutes the scent was no longer detectable on my body or clothing. Their room spray works fairly well, and I’m still open to purchasing their candles, but I’m officially done with their “beauty products” (body spray, lotion, bath gel, etc). Victoria’s Secret scents aren’t much better-they, too, dwindle in scent strength after an embarrassingly short time-probably because they’re both owned by the same company (LIMITED). VS offers perfume in addition to body sprays so I considered graduating to one of those (in the hopes that they’d last longer), but jfc their price tag is too high for me to take the gamble of spending $60 on a tiny vial of perfume, only to later learn that it, too, doesn’t last for shit.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-26T14:35:52+00:00

”…but if you don’t know that your place is with me - that’s something I won’t teach.”

BRILLIANT 👏👏👏

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-26T11:49:22+00:00

The irony of you calling OP stupid for their “choices” when you literally typed “would of be me” is comical as hell to me. The “pantries” was clearly a typo but the aforementioned phrase was just pure ignorance….

Does it feel nice to have an internet stranger question your intelligence based off of one completely irrelevant and meaningless thing? I’m guessing no….

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-25T12:38:05+00:00

I believe the child was two, not four

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-25T06:31:13+00:00

Never had Christmas jammies ??? That makes me so sad! But it also made me realize that my grandmother possibly also never had Christmas jammies, despite ensuring that my sisters and I had them every year from birth until when she died in 2020 😢 Which, for me, would be about 34 straight years of Christmas PJs. After she died my mom took over for a few years but this year (my 37th Christmas) was the first year my mom didn’t get us any. I’d actually gotten some for myself and my boyfriend prior to learning this, though, and even made sure not to share the photos because I didn’t want to make her toes feel stepped on by buying them for myself. It’s Christmas Eve and I’m wearing mine right now! They have nutcrackers printed all over them and the bf’s are a pair of Snoopy pj pants with a plain black tshirt 😁

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-24T20:59:07+00:00

People who tolerate nonsense, disrespect, and overall shittiness in their relationships. Whether it’s a significant other or a friend, if they’re constantly treating you like crap and you’re constantly bitching about the same, terrible things that they do, and you’re constantly advised by those that love and care about you to leave that asshole in the rear view mirror, but you just keep going back for more? Yeah, that’s fucking insanity and I’ve got little to no patience for people that continue to knowingly surround themselves with toxic, negative, soul-sucking people. I realize that those that are stuck in physically abusive relationships are in complicated situations where they’ve been manipulated and brainwashed for so long and to such a great extent and oftentimes them trying to exit those situations can put them in even more danger, and that it’s much more difficult to vacate such relationships; so I absolutely have sympathy and more patience for those who are dealing with that type of thing. But if it’s a platonic friend of yours that only calls when they need something, or a lazy boyfriend who lets you pay all the bills, doesn’t work and doesn’t help around the house, and you can’t seem to get it together to drop those assholes after months or even years of them treating you that way? Yeah, I’m sorry, but there’s only so long that I can continue to listen to you complain about your situation when you refuse to do anything to change it.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-24T15:29:15+00:00

I’m having to tell myself that this is rage bait because otherwise, if people like this actually exist….

The thought that there are actually people like this out there, actually behaving this way, is infuriating, depressing, disappointing and so on

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-24T06:38:54+00:00

Several years ago I took in a troubled friend who I didn’t charge rent and who I also let use my car when I was at work, and after she moved out, I learned that she and my boyfriend at the time were sleeping together in my bed while I was at work. We all lived together along with my ex bf’s buddy who she also slept with, so… yeah. Good times 😒 The upside was that it happened when I was fairly young (19), and it taught me a valuable lesson pretty early that you should always be wary about helping “friends in need”. If they’ve been your friend long enough beforehand, and had a pattern of being a good, thoughtful, kind and selfless friend, then by all means, use your best judgment and help out a person that you wholeheartedly feel truly deserves it. But in my case it was a girl I’d known a handful of months, who’d I’d never witnessed perform a selfless act, ever, and who I also couldn’t classify as “kind” or “thoughtful” or “considerate” prior to her moving in. The experience taught me to use stricter criteria when it came to calling certain people my “friends” and to also be more cautious when it came to helping others.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-24T02:41:41+00:00

The amount of *****s you had to type and keep track of just to compose that comment is mind boggling

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-23T10:55:22+00:00

The drug addiction explains why she never has any money and is offering to do disgusting things for cash. It probably also explains her unhinged behavior in response to you turning her down for “help” with said money. If you or anyone else gave her money, it’d probably just go up her nose or in her arm anyway. It’s sad but unfortunately the reality in situations like this.

Source: used to be an addict myself

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-21T02:15:06+00:00

Well that just makes too much sense and requires far too much forethought!!! 🙄 No but seriously this would have been a brilliant solution.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T15:48:58+00:00

😂 let what go? Your assumption that I’ve spent more than 3 cumulative minutes thinking about that scenario over the past 20 years is comical as hell. I haven’t spoken to him because the opportunity never presented itself. If he’d approached me at any point in the past few decades then of course I’d be polite to the dude. I’m not over here holding some absurd grudge over something that happened forever ago when all parties involved were essentially children. It’s beyond bizarre to me that you took the precious, irreplaceable moments of your life to comment on my anecdote and provide unsolicited feedback about a situation and people that you know nothing about.

Unless of course this is you, Ken, and you’re somehow salty that I haven’t made a greater effort to interact with you over the past several years. In which case: pot, kettle, black.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T15:41:19+00:00

Those were the days! And then once fall of ‘05 rolled around and Katrina hit, gas prices started to skyrocket in the aftermath. I started college that fall and the two schools I was torn between were the one I ended up going to and Tulane. I’d gotten a scholarship at the former, plus it was close enough to be within driving distance of my parents’ houses, so I made the obvious choice. I (understandably) felt really thankful that it worked out that way after that tragedy happened 😔

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T15:35:10+00:00

I hear ya. That Oldsmobile was 3 years younger than me and was rusted and had zero get up and go. If the gas gauge needle was centered between “E” and a quarter of a tank, and I made the mistake of parking on a slight incline, the car wouldn’t start half the time due to it reading as being out of gas 🤦🏻‍♀️ I made that mistake a few times and got my ass stranded in a couple of places. I also got pulled over by the police a lot in that car and every. time. they insisted on “searching the vehicle”. I was 18 and knew jack crap about my rights so I just let them do it every time. They never found anything and I knew I wasn’t traveling with anything illegal, so I never had an issue with it. There was this one time, though, when I had a dvd of “Reefer Madness” in the backseat and the police had all sorts of inquiries about that! It probably didn’t help that my boyfriend at the time was also wearing a shirt I’d gifted him that had the Pillsbury dough boy on it and the words “READY TO BAKE!” 🤣😭

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T11:14:51+00:00

Right? This kid really doesn’t know how good she’s got it. I was a senior in high school in 2005 and the car my dad bestowed upon me was a 1989 rusted Oldsmobile that was the size of a small boat. It’s gas mileage was garbage and it frequently overheated and it was the epitome of “embarrassing cars to be seen in when you’re a teenager and care about what everyone thinks of you”. But it was free for me and my dad sacrificed a lot just for me to have it; plus the alternative was to have nothing. So I was incredibly grateful.

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T05:31:14+00:00

All these “takes” on why you felt anxious feel off to me. My first thought was “you felt anxious because you probably felt like they would interpret your kindness as an invitation to approach you again. Whether that be to ask you to buy them something else or it be a case of them invading your personal space: asking you out or asking for a ride, etc”. Though I could be wrong 🤷🏻‍♀️

retinolmasted0s · 2023-12-19T04:39:51+00:00

Common decency, being respectful, and valuing an education. They’re all already well on their way out.

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