Woman Feels Guilty For Refusing To Watch Sister's 5-Year-Old Stepson – Even After He Was Left Home Alone
Her sister is acting very odd.
Antonio Guillem / Shutterstock.com A 21-year-old woman who lives with her parents noticed an odd pattern that her married, 30-year-old sister who has a 5-year-old son has been doing for weeks now.
Every Monday, her sister would call their mother at 9 a.m. and ask her to watch her stepson because she had something important to go do — without giving any details about what that was.
Upon refusing one week because their mother was out of town, the woman caused a lot of family drama and tension in her sister’s marriage because she basically ratted her out.
The woman wonders if she was wrong for refusing to watch her sister’s stepson.
When you’re unsure about the decisions you might have made in a certain, stressful situation, and you need some advice on how to go about them or whether or not there’s something to learn from it, you visit the subreddit “r/AmItheA--hole” so internet strangers can help you solve all of your problems for free.
The way it works is: someone posts their dramatic argument/transgression/outburst, and then internet philosophers come along to help you solve them — and give you a rating on whether or not you were in the wrong to boot.
The rating system is based on comments that will either read, NTA, which stands for “Not The A--hole,” YTA, which stands for “You’re The A--hole,” NAH, which means “No A--holes Here,” or ESH, which means “Everyone Sucks Here.”
Anyway, back to the story.
When the sister called, “I said no because I had to go study and also she does this every Monday so clearly it wasn't important or urgent but she insisted it was, I told her sorry but no. She ended the call then I went to the university,” she said.
Understandably so, if the sister doesn’t reveal what’s so important about the thing she needs to go do then it probably isn’t more important than completing your studies at the university you go to.
It’s also not really your responsibility.
That child isn’t hers, it’s her sister’s husband’s child, and as such it’s her responsibility as a stay-at-home-mother, which the post clarifies.
“Hours later, I got a call from my brother-in-law asking where my sister was, I said I had no idea. He proceeded to tell me he just came home at 1pm and found his son by himself at the house,” she continued the story.
“I was in shock that my sister left her stepkid by himself so she could go God knows where. I told him about the conversation I had with her and he got angry."
She goes on to talk about her sister coming over to their family’s house to cause a scene — basically yelling at her younger sister that she was “petty and selfish."
“Not just that, but I also told her husband that mom comes over every Monday morning to watch the kid for a few hours which caused a huge fight between him and my sister,” she said.
Now the whole family thinks she’s the one to blame and should’ve just helped out her sister without really caring or worrying about what she has to deal with or the things she had to do.
If you guessed that the majority of internet philosophers rated her NTA, you’d be correct.
They all raise a bunch of really good, valid, and simply true points about why the younger sister is not to blame in the slightest.
A lot of them also got right to the point, the direct root of the problem: where in the world is she going at 9 a.m. every Monday without her husband knowing?
“NTA. So is your sister having an affair, or is she a drug addict?” said the top comment, which was upvoted nearly 21 thousand times.
“NTA a 30-year-old does not need this coddling. She left a 5-year-old alone for who knows how long to get into who knows what trouble,” said another one of the top comments.
One comment applauded her for ratting her sister, who is clearly lying to her husband, out to her husband, saying “You may be the only decent person in your family.”
The younger sister that posted the original conundrum provided an update, thanking everyone for the kind words because her family made her feel like she was in the wrong, and saying that she would get to the bottom of what was really happening with her sister and what she was doing every Monday.
Isaac Serna-Diez is a writer who focuses on entertainment and news, social justice, and politics. Follow him on Twitter here.