‘Exhausted’ Wife Left in Tears After Husband Wakes Her Up at 6:45AM on Thanksgiving

Holidays are often framed as a time to come together and celebrate, but the pressure, planning and lack of rest leading up to them can make emotions run high.

One woman on Reddit shared that an early-morning burst of enthusiasm from her husband ended up pushing her over the edge instead of making her smile.

“My husband burst through my bedroom door at 6:45 a.m. to yell ‘Happy Thanksgiving!’ And I was instantly mad,” she wrote. “I was tired. I told him the morning before how exhausted I was.”

Her reaction, she explained, didn’t come out of nowhere. For weeks she’d been running on empty.

Just the previous weekend, she had flown overseas with their teen so they could attend a music festival, noting that they were on their feet for “11 hours straight each day. Not including dancing and jumping.”

As soon as she returned home, she went straight back to work without any time to recover.

Thanksgiving, she said, was supposed to be her first chance to sleep in, even though she still had “a lot of Thanksgiving cooking to do.” The entire holiday meal was her responsibility — and she’d accepted that — but she was counting on a few extra hours of rest first.

She added that she’s a light sleeper and rarely gets the “6–7 hours of sleep” she needs, especially with a teen who wakes at 5 a.m. and her own habit of going to bed late.

So when her husband flung open the door on her day off, she felt like the one thing she’d been clinging to — a quiet morning — had been taken away. “Once I’m awake, and the light of day has encountered my eyes, that’s it,” she wrote.

When she confronted him about it, the conversation escalated quickly. Instead of apologizing, he criticized her.

He told her that “any normal person is up by this time,” brushing off how drained she felt and the fact that she’d taken on most of the holiday workload.

As the argument continued, she said he “called me names, said I was stupid, told me I’m acting like an asshole and ruining the day.”

The situation worsened when, according to her, “he started to mock me, loudly, dramatically,” turning what she saw as a simple request for understanding into a painful experience.

“I hate crying. I never cry,” she admitted, but this time she broke down. Through tears she asked him, “6:45 a.m. is unreasonable, why are you trying to make me feel like I’m crazy?”

Her husband, she said, refused to back down, insisting he “is not going to apologize for spreading holiday cheer.”

Commenters rallied around her in the thread, with many calling his behavior “rude” and “inconsiderate.”

“Sounds like a spoiled man-child to me,” one person wrote. “That was a horrible, abusive thing he did, and his reaction to your distress was toxic.”

Others urged her to stop taking on all the Thanksgiving labor, suggesting that “if he’s so pumped about the holiday he can channel that energy into mashed potatoes and turkey prep instead of being your 6 a.m. alarm clock.”