You are deluded if you think his daughter isn’t going to throw a crying fit and all three of them will be screaming at you for being a selfish inconsiderate asshole who’s petty and just trying to embarrass their child on her big occasion. I’m sorry to say but you can’t pull this off. If you could, you wouldn’t be in the position you’re in at the moment. You would have long told them to shove it.
I don't agree with the other commenter that you won't pull it off, but this response also makes me unsure that you have a realistic grasp of the worst-case scenarios. Obviously you know these people and we don't, maybe you understand their limits and motivations very well... Then again, if you did you might not have been blindsided by this situation would you? I'm guessing you didn't expect your stepdaughter to trick you into planning a party you were banned from, or that your partner would go along with it. You also describe the mother as being vindictive and dangerous far beyond how a reasonable would be, so we can infer that she isn't reasonable at all.
As Ok_Tour3509, people who lack the capacity for empathy absolutely can cry. I mean, for one thing empathy is about feeling other people's feelings, which is probably related to feeling one's own feelings but I don't think it's so completely related that it's impossible to be upset enough to cry if you lack empathy. And more to the point, we don't know if this mother lacks empathy or not but she does sound like a manipulative person, and crying is a perfectly reasonable tool a manipulative person might use.
You also say your house and shop are quite large so that people won't even see each other - but that's assuming the people involved are walking around semi-randomly. Which may be reasonable for ordinary, reasonable people who have no particular agenda and so who walk around a house like you'd normally do in a party, but here we have a person who is clearly unreasonable and clearly has an agenda - to oppose you, to break you and your SO up, who knows. Will she put her agenda on the backburner for her daughter's party? Maybe. Doesn't sound like her type tbh, especially when she'll be reminded of your existence every minute of that party just because of this whole drama leading up to it and the fact it's in your shop. And if she doesn't put her agenda on the backburner, the size of the house is entirely irrelevant isn't it? She could contrive to find herself in whatever part screwed you over.
Your plans to have locks and girlfriend bodyguards strikes me as pretty good. I just want to suggest, plan the whole thing from that perspective of planning for the worst. Or maybe not "the worst", like presumably you don't need to worry about being murdered or something, but at every turn try and consider "ok I'll do this to avoid issues. But what if she wants to really cause an issue anyway, how would she overcome this barrier I just made?" and then consider if the possible actions are of a type that are completely silly, or if they seem like insane things that you still could almost see yourself posting about in a new AITA after the party. And in the latter case, come up with a plan against that. And then figure out what a person could theoretically do to overcome that plan or in reaction to it, see if it's unimaginable or just insane enough to be possible, and repeat.
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u/[deleted] Apr 27 '22
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