My brother and I are chatting with our mom. My mom, meanwhile, is cooing over the dog.

Mom: “Are you my baby? Yes, you are! You’re my favorite, and if the house caught fire, I’d save you first.”

Me: “You wouldn’t save your own kids?”

Mom: “You two are thirty and twenty-six. I think you would know to get out if the house was on fire.”

Thirty years ago, we had just had our first baby, and my husband was in awe of everything I did to care for him and wanted to help. I come from a large family and had plenty of practice with nieces and nephews; my husband was an only child of an only child and had never cared for a newborn. I was afraid he’d fumble, so I did practically everything the first week we were home from the hospital.

One morning, I woke up to loud squalling from the bathroom. I rolled out of bed and waddled (I had just had a nine-pound baby) to the bathroom to find my husband in the shower, soaking wet and fully clothed. He had the hand-held shower head in one hand, naked baby in the other, and was washing the screaming baby’s butt with the stream from the shower.

Me: “What are you doing?!” 

Hubby: “I tried to wipe off the poop with those little wet cotton balls you have by the crib and it wasn’t working.” 

Me: “Why is he crying so hard?”  

Hubby: “I used cold water because I was afraid I’d scald him.” 

I decided then and there to make him a more active participant in caring for our children, but with proper training, of course! He’s a pretty good partner!

My wife’s grandmother is… not all there. Her husband passed away in 2018, and the rest of the family had to make her see sense that she could not live in their countryside home by herself anymore. She has issues with falling, and her driving is atrocious; her husband once bought her a brand-new car, and two weeks later, it was totaled. After spending the better part of a month trying to get her to face reality, she finally agreed to come back to live in the same town as the rest of us so her son, my father-in-law, could be close by in case of an emergency.

For some reason, [Wife’s Grandmother] always preferred her other son, who lived two states away and had hardly ever really helped her with anything — not that she helped him with much, either. When my wife and I were getting married, his car broke down and he asked her to borrow $250 to rent a car to make it here for his niece’s wedding. She refused, even though she was entirely able to, and we still don’t know why outside of simple greed.

[Wife’s Grandmother] had also been screwing over her late husband’s children with his previous wife and essentially managed to ensure that they saw basically zero of his inheritance and she cleaned house. Meanwhile, the rest of us were obligated to literally clean her old house as we gathered her stuff — and there was A TON of it — to move back with us. She ended up with approximately $250,000 from inheritance, pensions, life insurance, etc. That number would never stay that high for long, however.

She’s also extremely paranoid — in all the wrong places. She’s accused every family member at least once of stealing something. After we cleaned the house, she accused me of taking a package of plain white T-shirts that had belonged to her husband as if I couldn’t just go to the store and buy some myself. My wife also assured me that even if I was so desperate for clothes, he would’ve just let me have them, but no, it had to be a big deal with [Wife’s Grandmother].

She also had a friend of hers convince her that her son was stealing from her because of a fallen object in her house; she had knocked it over when she left but only saw it when she came back. But then, when she called the police, she answered the door with a GUN IN HAND. The cop immediately disarmed her but I think didn’t take her seriously after that.

My father-in-law, due to [Wife’s Grandmother] mental issues and paranoia, has been trying to gain power of attorney over her so that if she does something stupid he can try to fix it.

Unfortunately, [Wife’s Grandmother]’s stupid actions are not just a one-off occurrence. Somehow, despite how she accuses her family of stealing from her, she will meet men online and believe every word they say as gospel truth and then insist on flying states away to go meet them. Of course, every one of them usually just cooks up a sob story and she’ll already have her wallet open.

[Wife’s Grandmother] provides her information to anyone who just asks, so it’s no mystery when she has her identity stolen. Unfortunately, because of this, she’s had tens of thousands of dollars either stolen or scammed out of her. When my father-in-law intercepted a transaction for a huge amount of money, he tried so hard to get the bank to undo it. When [Wife’s Grandmother] found how much money was missing, of course, she accused her son of stealing it.

Some of these scammers have photos online that are so obviously fake it hurts to even look at. On one of [Wife’s Grandmother]’s MANY Facebook accounts, we even saw her post pictures of two of the scammer’s fake photos, a ton of her valuables, and to top it all off, her own birth certificate and SSN card. We all begged her for weeks to take that post down, but I don’t think she ever did.

Wife: “Hey, come look at this.”

She shows me a picture of an older-looking man, pretty similar to the type [Wife’s Grandmother] has been regularly contacting.

Wife: “Does he look familiar?”

Me: “No? Should I recognize him from somewhere?”

Wife: “Yeah, I hope so, considering that’s me!”

In order to prove to her grandmother how easy it is to turn yourself into anything and anyone online, my wife took a picture of herself, a twenty-two-year-old woman, and applied several filter layers to transform into a seventy-year-old man. Looking closer, I recognize that those are indeed still her cheekbones and eyebrows. It took her all of five minutes, and she already has a Facebook profile set up for this pretend person and has sent [Wife’s Grandmother] a friend request.

I don’t know if she takes this particular bait, but the scams continue. Once again, my father-in-law tries to intercept a fraudulent transaction but is too late to stop it. It turns out that was literally the last of [Wife’s Grandmother]’s money saved from her husband’s passing. All $250,000 that he saved up his whole life for, which now would’ve gone to my father-in-law and uncle-in-law on her death, is completely gone after like the third time she’s had her identity stolen in less than two years. Now, all she is left with is her Social Security income and nothing else. About a week after this, she calls us.

Grandmother: “Hey, [Father-In-Law], there’s this man I met online. He says he needs major surgery but he’s short two thousand dollars. Could you help me send it to him?”

The Rest Of Us: *Groans exasperatedly*

I came out to my mom as gay about two years ago. As a Muslim woman, obviously, she wasn’t too happy about it. She told me she was disappointed in me, and at one point, she even told me she would never love me in the same way she once did.

Recently, my boyfriend and I celebrated our one-year anniversary. I had no idea what to get him as a present, and I guess my mom overheard me on the phone with my friend while I was talking about it. The morning of our anniversary, she called me downstairs. On the table was a little box from [Pet Store].

Me: “Is that a [Pet Store] box? What did you get?”

Mom: “It’s a frog for [Boyfriend]! So he can add him to his collection! They said his name is Big Daddy. Isn’t that funny?”

My boyfriend has a big terrarium in his room where he keeps four frogs. He loves his frogs more than anything.

Me: “That’s cute, but why’d you get him a frog?”

Mom: “It’s for you to give to him; you need a present!”

That particular morning changed my entire view of people, especially family. There will be times when you feel as if they don’t love you, that you let them down, and that you can never gain that love back. But let some time pass, and you will both understand that love conquers all.

At the end of the day, my mother is still my mother. And she loves me. And I love her. And my boyfriend loved Big Daddy.

My mother is… not a nice person. A lifetime of self-centered nonsense caused my father to divorce her. She promptly got together with my stepdad but managed to keep custody of me.

After I grew up and moved out, something she actually tried to forbid, she would call at random hours of the night to scream at me for being a horrible person for abandoning her and defying her will. I went low-contact with her for a long time after that.

Years later, I was pregnant with twins. My husband, unfortunately, had to work through most of the day. I was having a high-risk pregnancy, so my mom was staying with me to help. Her behavior had mellowed out considerably in the intervening years, so I thought we were working toward reconciliation.

That changed when she decided to go home for the weekend to spend it with my stepdad for his birthday.

Her last words to me before she walked out the door were:

Mom: “Don’t go into labor while I’m gone!”

Because the world has a sick sense of humor, twelve hours later, my water broke and I went into premature labor.

When she got to the hospital, my mom didn’t even ask where the babies were. No, instead she came up to me and yelled at me for having gone into labor and messing up her weekend with my stepdad.

She was screaming at me so loudly that I couldn’t even hear the staff rushing to my room.

Mom: “I ordered you not to go into labor! How dare you defy me yet again? How dare you go into labor?! You made your water break on purpose just for attention and to sabotage my weekend!”

And other insane things.

The hospital staff tried to pull her away. She shook them off several times until three burly security guards had to get a hold of her and physically force her out.

Her few years of better behavior were swept away after spending just a little time with me, and it brought back every nasty behavior she had dumped on me during my younger years.

The hospital was amazing. My mom was persona non grata at the door, and I got a security guard to guard my room door during visiting hours just in case. My husband managed to get a day off work to change our house keys; my mom had gotten a copy while “helping” me.

I am now fully no-contact with my mother, and she has never met my gorgeous children — her grandchildren. She never will, either.