Bride says her mother could come to the wedding but her siblings could not — then she considered uninviting her mom too

A bride says she has spent years trying to rebuild a fragile relationship with her mother, but one wedding issue brought a lot of old hurt right back to the surface: her younger siblings. She wanted them at her wedding badly enough to offer major financial help, but when her mother kept dodging the plan, the bride started wondering if inviting her mother at all was a mistake.

In a Reddit post, the 22-year-old bride explained that her parents split when she was young. Her father was in the military, and most of her memories of being raised were tied to her mother. But the relationship was complicated. She said her mother had a hard life, struggled with alcohol abuse and mental health, and had a string of difficult relationships. Because of that, the bride described her childhood as painful.

The one bright spot, she said, was her six younger siblings.

Even though she is quite a bit older than them, the bride said that age gap only made their bond stronger. After she moved to Australia, she was low-contact or no-contact with her mother for a while and went to therapy to work through her past. Over time, things seemed to improve. Her mother earned a nursing degree, became the breadwinner, and had apparently gone to family therapy with the bride’s stepfather. The bride said she now viewed her mother more like a casual friend.

But there was one thing she had wanted from her mother since she was young. When she got married, she wanted all of her siblings there.

Her mother had agreed to that before. So when the bride started planning her wedding, she gave her mother months of notice. Part of the reason, she said, was so her mother could get the finances and logistics together to bring the siblings to Australia.

At first, the mother ignored the subject when it came up on the phone. When the bride mentioned it again, her mother gave what the bride called a cagey answer. Then messages were left unread for weeks.

The bride and her fiancé tried to make it easier. They drafted a message offering to cover nearly everything, including housing, if her mother would handle the logistics of getting the siblings passports and onto the plane. In the comments, the bride clarified that they were willing to cover flights, housing, food, activities, and other major costs, but she did not want to assume what her mother would be comfortable accepting.

Still, her mother’s silence left her frustrated.

That frustration quickly turned into a bigger question: should her mother be invited if the siblings were not coming? The bride said she was considering inviting her mother only as a regular guest and not giving her any motherly duties, because she did not feel her mother cared about fulfilling them.

Her fiancé told her he would support whatever she decided, but he also worried she might regret not having her mother involved in those traditional wedding moments. The bride, though, said she had other mother figures in her life and felt her mother should be honored to receive an invite at all.

At the same time, she knew the ask was big. Getting six kids to Australia is not like driving across town. It means passports, school schedules, packing, long flights, missed work, and a lot of stress. She also admitted this year had not been easy for her family and that her mother had been trying in some ways.

That left the bride stuck between two feelings. She wanted her siblings there because they mattered deeply to her. But she also seemed to be testing whether her mother would show up for her in the one way she had always asked.

Commenters said the plan was bigger than the bride realized

Commenters were pretty blunt with the bride. Many said she was not wrong for wanting her siblings at the wedding, but they felt she was underestimating how difficult the request was. Bringing six children to Australia would mean expensive passports, intense travel days, missed school, and a huge amount of planning.

Several commenters also pushed back on making her mother’s invitation feel conditional. They argued that the bride was using the wedding as a test: bring the siblings, or risk losing your place at the wedding. To them, that was not a clean boundary. It was an ultimatum wrapped in wedding planning.

Others were more sympathetic. They understood why the bride wanted her siblings there so badly, especially after a childhood where they had been one of the few bright spots. Some suggested a different solution, like visiting them during a honeymoon, holding a second small ceremony closer to them, or creating a video call so they could still be part of the day.

The strongest advice was for the bride to decide what role, if any, she truly wanted her mother to have — without tying everything to whether her mother could successfully manage an enormous international trip for six kids.

The outcome

The post ended with the bride still weighing her options. She had not officially uninvited her mother, and in the comments, she seemed open to rethinking the whole plan. One suggestion that caught her attention was using part of the wedding or honeymoon budget to go to her siblings instead of trying to bring all of them to Australia.

That idea seemed to shift things for her. She admitted she had become so fixated on having them at the wedding that she had pushed other possibilities aside.

By the end, the situation was less about one invitation and more about years of wanting her mother to show up differently. The bride wanted her siblings with her on a major day. Her mother’s silence felt like another disappointment. But Reddit pushed her to see that even a painful family history does not make a complicated travel demand any easier to pull off.