My mom was a nanny for a very rich couple for their two children. My mom was pretty much the constant in their lives and would sometimes even watch them overnight and on weekends. It got to the point that she had to sit them down and remind them that she wasn’t their mother and they shouldn’t call her “Mom”.

When I was eleven or twelve, my family went on a vacation to an amusement park known as the “happiest place on earth”. This was planned well in advance, so the couple had plenty of time to get other sitters.

We were standing in one of the parks planning our next ride when I looked into the crowd and spotted a familiar face.

Me: “Mom, look! It’s [Kid #1] and [Kid #2]!”

Mom: “Don’t be silly! They’re back home in Pennsylvania… Oh, son of a b****.”

It turned out that I was right! The couple, distraught over losing my mom for a week, booked an emergency trip to the park and had planned to just leave the kids with my mom.

In all honesty, I’m shocked that we even stumbled across each other randomly because we could have been in one of the different parks.

My mom made sure to confront her boss over this stunt.

Mom: “Listen, we can hang out for a little bit, but I’m not watching your kids. I already am dealing with mine and don’t have the energy for two toddlers. Take this time to actually make some memories with your kids and bond with them.”

When I was in high school, I was once “asked” to babysit a neighbour’s kids. She worded it as, “Your mom said you could babysit for me,” but I later learned that my mom had only agreed to let her ask me. Being a literal child, and a timid one, I assumed I didn’t really have a choice and agreed. I had never babysat anyone before, not even someone near my own age, so I have no idea why they thought I was suited to watch their children.

When I got there, I learned there were four of them: two older girls and two young boys, one still in diapers. One of the boys was running around naked, and nobody seemed to care. I understand that this is normal for young kids, but even the parents didn’t say anything, and I had to ask one of the older kids to take him to get dressed. Their house was a mess, and the kids didn’t try to clean up after themselves at all, even the ones old enough to know better.

All that, I could have dealt with. The worst part was when I learned that instead of leaving to go to a bar or something, as I assumed, the mother wanted me to babysit while she and her friends locked themselves in a room and got high. I have no problem with that in general, but I really didn’t appreciate being in the same house as a bunch of strangers taking at-the-time illegal substances!

I stayed there for three hours, and I had to tell the mother that my time was up and I was leaving because she wasn’t paying attention to the clock. Seeming barely aware of her surroundings, she got up, brought her youngest kid to her bed, and fell asleep with him while the rest of her kids were still awake.

For those three hours, I got a total of $35, delivered to me over a week later — after my mother hounded her — and the woman took it out of her sweaty bra to hand it to me.

There were two further incidents with this woman before we finally got her to stop speaking to our family, including one where she got drunk and threw trash all over our yard in the middle of the night!

I work in a cafe, and we start to pack up at 12:00. One time, this group of mums and their little kids came in at 12:00. They all ordered coffee as I hadn’t closed the machine, and they tried to order some food. Their kids were being pests, and we still needed to pack up the inside of the cafe.

So, I started to play explicit songs over the speakers — nothing bad, just language, and my supervisor agreed.

All it took was one child to repeat a word and then all of them were saying words from the songs. The mums quickly gathered their kids and left.

I live in a quiet rural area in a small apartment building in the middle of an area of family homes. As such, my bedroom window is directly opposite and slightly above the neighboring house’s terrace. The family owning said house has two very young children — about two or three years old at max — and evidently, neither they nor their children have any concept of volume.

For the past months, ever since the weather outside started being nice and warm, the neighbors have decided to simply not deal with their children anymore and let them out in the garden or onto the terrace at all hours of the day. On the off chance that the parents are outside with them, they will simply ignore their children, no matter how loud they are. Those two banshees-in-training will screech all day, and the neighborhood simply has to live with the cacophony.

It all reached a new extreme recently when I got woken up in the morning by more screeching and the sound of the neighbor’s children ramming their bobby cars into the balcony railings, next to which a jet engine would have been considered quiet — directly below my bedroom window. Entirely fed up after an exhausting week of work and also weeks of not getting any proper sleep due to the neighboring children, I got up and opened the window just in time to see the two children’s mom trying to sneak off the balcony back into her house.

I yelled out the window over the sound of her children:

Me: “IT IS 7:00 AM ON A SUNDAY! GET YOUR HELLSPAWN TO SHUT THE F*** UP OR SO HELP ME!”

It has been almost two weeks since then. I haven’t had an issue sleeping anymore, and the neighbors haven’t let their children out of the house before 9:00 or 10:00 am on the weekends anymore. They still scream and rampage during the day, but that’s okay with me. They’re kids; they gotta play. I simply value my sleep on the few days that I actually CAN sleep in.

I hope this blissful quiet lasts.

CONTENT WARNING: Violence Toward Children

This story reminded me of an event in my childhood.

My brother and I both had (and destroyed) a few Super Soakers during our childhood. At one point, my Super Soaker 2000 — AKA that purple cannon thing that could seriously injure eyes — was broken, so we played in the neighborhood with my brother’s double-barrel Super Soaker, one with a lever on top to start spraying.

We were walking on a sidewalk next to a playground when I had the terrific idea to start spraying by pulling this lever. We hit the window of one of the adjacent houses, and we instantly knew that it probably wasn’t appreciated (and might’ve given someone a slight jumpscare). We took a run for it toward a soccer field behind the playground and were pretty confident nothing would come of it.

That was until, suddenly, an elderly guy was standing behind my little brother (who was probably seven years old or so). The guy grabbed his Super Soaker, which was still strapped around his shoulder, and started pulling. He practically strangled my brother for a second before getting the Super Soaker off him and smashing it into pieces on the steel goalposts of the soccer field. He ended his assault with a crazed look in his eyes.

Elderly Guy: “Don’t do that again!”

And he took off.

We were obviously shocked, but as children often do, we pretty much blamed ourselves because we had sprayed his windows, and judging by his reaction, that’s something that adults just get really angry about.

Feeling guilty, we went home and didn’t say anything to our parents, but they read our faces soon enough and got the story out. We feared that we would get a second run of punishment, but instead, they told us to stay at home, assured us that we weren’t in trouble, and went out.

Afterward, they didn’t really share all that much about the aftermath, though we heard enough shouting about how “a lunatic like you can live next to a playground and not expect something like this to happen”. My little brother got a new Super Soaker — a better one — from the crazy neighbour and had a sore neck and bruises from the ordeal.

Years later, however, I stumbled upon some files on my parents’ computer that brought to light that they did file a police report, and the guy was actually fined pretty heavily. The money was put in a savings account for my brother for when he came of age.