AITA for telling my wife I won't have kids with her until we watch my nieces or nephews for at least a month?
Recently my wife Jenna has been talking more and more about us starting a family. Which is fine, I love kids, but they are a lot of work.
Jenna is an only child and the youngest of all her cousins. As a result, before marrying me she's never really been around babies, toddlers, or young kids for more than a few hours at a time, and those times it was always someone else's kids, not kids that she was responsible directly for.
I'm the opposite. I was the oldest kid and the oldest cousin (in some cases by a pretty large margin), so I was always the default caretaker for my siblings, cousins, and so on. When they started having kids, I was again the default baby sitter for my nieces, nephews, and cousins children. The oldest is now 12, and the youngest 6 months.
My wife has been around when I've had them of course, sometimes for a week or so, but every time something goes wrong or gets gross she passes them along to me. She's very fun, great at entertaining kids, and loves them dearly, but I've seen her change a diaper maybe once in 5 years and she panics at the sight of a crying 3 year old and foists them off on me as soon as Big Feelings start.
Now that she's pushing so hard for kids, I told her that I don't know if she's fully prepared for how different our lives will become with those kids in it. At least for the first few years our lives will pretty much revolve around them 24/7. And while I know my family, and her parents probably, would be a lot of help, they can only do so much.
This has been a source of contention, because she's taking it as a personal insult instead of an honest concern.
During one of our more heated discussions she told me that she was perfectly capable of being a good mother, and I told her that if that's the case then we should have some of my nieces or nephews over for at least a full month and split the entire time 50/50 instead of her handing them off to me as soon as they got upset, and until we did something like that I wasn't willing to have kids.
Well this turned into a massive fight and she told me I'm a dick for accusing her of being unfit to parent. And I'm really struggling to repair it without just giving in. Because I don't think that I'm wrong, but I also don't want my wife to be unhappy or hurt, certainly not because of me.
AITA for telling my wife I wanted a trial run before we have actual kids?