My wife (33F) and I (34M) recently talked about getting a dog for our three kids. We decided against it, but a week later she said that she had changed her mind and really wanted to get the dog. I told her if it was something she was really passionate about that I would happily take care of the dog 50% of the time if she could take the other half.

I am the breadwinner of our house, though she does work 2 days a week, which I told her she could keep all the earnings from as I think it’s great she’s trying new things. Bottom line, we got the dog and she immediately said she couldn’t handle the stress of a puppy. I tried taking more responsibility, leaving her with the dog for just one hour per day and working with the dog in my lap, but even that was too much.

We are now going to bring the dog back to breeder, which I feel completely awful about, but we only had her for 4 days, so our kids didn’t get too attached, but still the biggest parenting fail we’ve ever had. We agreed that we are both at fault for this decision, so I asked her if she could talk with me to our kids about it and contribute half of the money that we lost on this mistake. She is extremely angry about this and cussed me out for quite a while. I was calm through the conversation and even through the aggressive language, but I’m at a loss at how me asking her to split the loss with me is so egregious. I had a very long conversation with our kids on my own with her in the other room listening, and they said they understand but are angry with their mom (which I tried to tell them it’s on both of us, but they are mad she won’t talk to them about it). Full transparency, this is far from the first time she has done something like this, so I felt like I had to make some sort of stand as I want to continue to make decisions together but I can’t keep dealing with all of the repercussions myself. So, AITA???