My childhood cat was very food-motivated and very vocal about wanting her next meal.

At one point, my mom told me to be prepared to come down for the cat’s final days because she’d stopped demanding food. We both figured that once she lost interest in eating, it was probably the beginning of the end for her. Mom continued to keep a close eye on her, and though her health did not seem to be declining, she still did not have her usual enthusiasm for being fed.

Eventually, my mom called me and told me to disregard her previous portents of doom. Between laughs, she told me how they’d emptied the bag of food they had upstairs, gone down to the basement to get the next bag, and discovered the hole she’d gnawed in the side of it. And once her secret stash of food disappeared, she immediately returned to loudly begging.

That cat went on to live until the ripe old age of eighteen. And she remained vocal about her desire for food until the very end.

My husband and I have a son who is about to turn four, and we have a baby girl on the way.

As a baby, my son developed a severe allergy to diapers. He’d get awful rashes that took way too long to get better, and nothing we did helped much. Because of that, my husband and I decided to start potty training a bit early, right before he was eighteen months old. We talked to his pediatrician and relied on cloth diapers as much as we could. After a few months of that, he’d almost grown out of his allergy, but we kept going.

Today, he’s fully potty trained. He has some (very) rare accidents, but only when he tries to delay his bathroom trips for too long. When that happens, we wash him up and replace his underwear.

My husband’s mother was firmly against our decision to potty train our son early. She insisted that it would lead to IBS and that he should wear diapers until he was at least three. She tried to convince us to change our minds for months, but we held our ground.

In early December, I had a doctor’s appointment while my husband was at work, so I left our son with [Mother-In-Law] for a couple of hours. Sometime later, she called me and said [Son]’d had a (bathroom) accident. He hadn’t had one in months. I instructed her on how to proceed, as well as where to find the spare clothes I’d packed for him.

I picked [Son] up about an hour later. On our way home, he complained about being “itchy”. I didn’t know why until I got him ready for bathtime later that night. He was wearing a diaper. (It was clean.)

He didn’t get any rashes, but the diaper was a couple of sizes too small, and he hadn’t worn one in a long time, so I think that’s where the itchiness came from. When I asked him about it, he confirmed that [Mother-In-Law] had said he was “still a baby” and put him in the diaper.

When my husband and I confronted her about it, she defended herself by saying his accident was clear proof we’d made a mistake by potty training him early, and he should go back to wearing diapers for the time being. At no point did she apologize.

We decided that [Mother-In-Law] was forbidden from babysitting, as well as from spending time with our son unsupervised. She is not our only babysitting option; my mom and stepdad, my sister, my brother-in-law, and my best friend also babysit. [Mother-In-Law] didn’t think we were serious until we went to her place on Saturday. We had to go to the hospital, and rather than leaving our son with her, we took him with us.

Now that she knew we were serious, she started calling us dramatic and ungrateful, as well as claiming that we were alienating her from her grandchildren out of stubbornness. She maintained that she was right about early potty training being a bad idea and that she was only trying to help us.

I didn’t think we were in the wrong, but this did feel a bit dramatic. My brother-in-law, who was skeptical of our decision back in the day, thought we were right to be angry but it was still an overreaction to revoke [Mother-In-Law]’s permission to babysit our son.

For a while after the diaper incident, I’d been wondering where [Mother-In-Law] had gotten the diaper from. When I asked her about it, she told me it was a leftover from when my son was younger. As much as I didn’t think that was true, it did make some sense, and she swore by it. When I asked my son back in December, he just told me she had the diaper.

After I posted about it online in early January, some people reached out to me with theories about that. I talked to my husband about them, and later that week, we decided to confront [Mother-In-Law] again. We did it over the phone after our son went to bed.

This time, she decided she wanted to “come clean” — her exact words. She admitted that the diaper wasn’t a leftover, but rather a new one she bought right after [Son]’s accident.

To clarify: rather than obey my instructions and change my son into his spare clothes, [Mother-In-Law] left him alone in her bathtub while she went to the pharmacy near her house and bought diapers. She left my three-year-old alone in her house for ten whole minutes because she wanted to prove a point.

She claimed what she did was fine because the bathtub was empty and she’d locked the bathroom door. She also said [Son] was crying when she got home, and she “comforted” him by saying it would make my husband and me happy to see him in a diaper.

And then, she had the nerve to say that it was “good to get this off her chest” and that we could finally move on from this.

Needless to say, the word “outraged” doesn’t even begin to cover how we were feeling. My husband yelled at [Mother-In-Law] for over half an hour before hanging up the phone.

My husband and I talked to [Son] about it, and he said he didn’t tell us anything because he didn’t want us to be mad at him. We managed to reassure him that he’d done nothing wrong. We promised him that he’s a big boy, and he’ll never wear a diaper again.

[Mother-In-Law] called us several times over the weekend. She gave us dozens of excuses, ranging from “I couldn’t find his underwear” (I clearly remember her announcing she had it when she called me that day) to “I left my sons home alone all the time when they were younger” (my husband had no idea).

We lost whatever patience we had that day. We decided that [Mother-In-Law] won’t be allowed near our family for the next six months. If she doesn’t improve her behavior until then, that will become permanent. She’s also uninvited from [Son]’s fourth birthday party next month and won’t be allowed to see our daughter at the hospital when she’s born (I’m due in May).

We sent her a text with the above before blocking her. Even if she does change, she’ll never be allowed to babysit our kids again. We have other people who can take care of them on occasion.

My mom regularly video calls with my niece, my sister’s child, who is two years old. My mother also has four cats. Every time my sister initiates a call, my niece asks to see the cats. I overhear the most recent video call.

Mom: “Hi, [Niece], sweetie!”

Niece: “Kitty?”

Sister: *Exasperated* “Can you at least say hi to Grammie first?”

Niece: *Cheerily* “No, thank you, Grammie! Kitty, please!”

My mom and I went to the aquarium. Mom was just a couple of years shy of the cut-off to qualify for the senior discount, which was sixty-five and up. When we noticed, we joked a little about it with the ticket lady.

I pointed to the single grey hair on my head that I’ve had since high school.

Me: “What, you didn’t notice I’m going grey? Clearly, I qualify!”

Neither of us got the senior discount, but we felt good anyway knowing we made the lady smile a little at our antics.

A few years ago, I worked at a wing delivery place after moving across the country for college. I accidentally left my microwave at home, but luckily, my mom had some business in the town I was living in, so she tossed it in her car and brought it with her to her hotel.

We’d discussed it beforehand, and she got a hotel in my delivery radius. She ordered some wings, and I was the driver for it. I got the wings, headed over, and started going to the elevators. I gave the front desk workers a small wave as I went by.

I got up to her room, made some small chat, and took my microwave from her. I made my way back down to the lobby, and the front desk workers called me over.

Worker: “What are you doing with that microwave?”

Me: “It was my tip from the customer!”

That hotel didn’t have microwaves in the rooms, so they let me go. I loved the confused looks on their faces.