You know those parents that pawn their kids off on other people? Well this Reddit user Meggsister tells her story about how her sister was a repeat offender. She was the free babysitter for years watching her sister’s demon kids, until one day she just had enough!
“Little back story: I’m the middle of 5 kids and it’s a complicated mess from my mom being married three times. Basically the order of us is my older sister from her first marriage that was raised by her grandmother for reasons I was never told. There’s me and my younger brother from her second, he’s only a year younger than me and we’ve always been super close because we were raised together. Then there’s my step-sister, who’s a few weeks younger and a step-brother a few years older than me from her third and last marriage. That man was a saint and treated me more like a daughter than my waste of skin father ever did.
The oldest of us is almost 10 years older than me and because she had a kid young, I was 8 when my first nephew was born. Thankfully, she didn’t live with the rest of us then, but when she moved back in with us when I was older (around 16), she had some fight with her baby daddy and bailed. I somehow became a free babysitter for her kids every weekend. This ticked me off A LOT because my mom not only allowed it, she told me I had no choice because ‘she needed time from the kids.’ Never mind the fact that I’m juggling school, a part-time job and Army Cadets and she was a stay at home mom. I had one night to myself each week to do my homework or go out with my friends and my sister would bugger off and leave me with her crotch goblins.
She didn’t even have the decency to feed them first and those little devils (ages 2, 7 and 8), were picky eaters. Trying to do my homework with these three fighting was more than I could take. It came to a point that I stopped coming home until late on my days off and just heading to the library or friends instead. This was also in the days before cell phones were common place and cost like $900 upfront, so my sister couldn’t text to demand where I was. As soon I would walk in the door, she practically bolted and got lippy if I told her I had to go to work or cadets.
My mom and step dad, who were truck drivers, were home less and less as we got older. My mom had made me start to pay rent when I got my part-time job, about $50 a week that went into helping the bills. I hated that because I didn’t make a lot and bus passes were not cheap. My mom also started to tell me that the money that I would give her for my rent was to go to my sister to buy groceries. My sister, on the other hand, used it to go to the casino with our other sister, then lie to my mom and tell her that I didn’t give her the money. I had to start getting her to sign receipts from a book I got at a dollar store just to prove she was full of it.
Anyways, this went on for close to two years sorry for the long back story, but this woman was the bane of my teen years and part of my 20s.
What finally broke the camel’s back was my 18th birthday. My mom and step dad couldn’t be there because of work, which was fine, and I had bought a nice dress to wear with some friends at the bar. Legal drinking age where I live is 18. They also told me they would be home the morning after, so we could grab lunch together after they had a nap.
I got home from school to shower and get dressed to head out. Because of her antics, I had a lock installed on my bedroom door. Plus, I didn’t want her kids in my room because they would break things. I was in such a hurry that I forgot to re-lock my door while I was in the shower. When I got back to my room, she was there, trying to zip up the dress I bought on her, but she was too fat to manage it.
Me: ‘Take that off and get out of my room!’
Sis: ‘I need something to wear tonight, I’m going out and you have to watch the kids.’
Me: ‘The heck I am. IT’S MY 18TH BIRTHDAY. I’m going out.’
Sis: ‘But I need you to watch them! You haven’t been home and I can’t afford a sitter.’
Then I hear a rip as one of the side seams bursts open. Smugly, my sister takes off the dress and drops it to the floor.
Sis: ‘Looks like you’re not going now, huh?’
She walked out of my room. I check the dress; the stitches on the seam broke, so I could fix it in less than 5 minutes. I call my boyfriend and tell him what’s going and he told me he would handle it and to get ready to go. I fix the dress, get ready and as finish my make up, I hear my sister start screaming in rage.
I go outside and barely hold back my laughter. All 4 tires on her car are flat. Then, my boyfriend pulls up and I pout at her, ‘Looks like you won’t be going, huh?’ And we leave.
Boyfriend had parked his car down the street and snuck over to let the air out, but not slash them. He wasn’t that much of a dirtbag. The night was a blast, what I remember of it. I didn’t get home to the buttcrack of dawn, just as my parents got home. Mom didn’t say anything– she just asked if I had fun and told me to be up by 11:00 so we could go and eat. I went to my room and collapsed into bed. I heard my sister start to whine to them in the kitchen, must have thought she could turn this to get me in shot, but my mom wasn’t having any of it and tore into her like I had never heard before. Not only was my sister called selfish and childish for trying to pull such a stunt, but she was not living there for free any longer. She was given 30 days to either get a job or leave.
She moved back in with her baby daddy two weeks later. Apparently she had been ‘seeing’ him the whole time she was living with us and was getting welfare checks without giving my parents a dime to help out while not even buying so much as a box of cereal for her kids.
To this day, I hate when any of my siblings, even my younger brother, asks me to watch their kids. I don’t hate my nieces and nephews, far from it. I just don’t want to be in the situation of being that run-to free baby sitter. I’m also the only one among us 5 who doesn’t have kids and I’m perfectly content with that.”
