Sometimes your family needs help from you. On a popular Reddit thread in the Am I The A**hole Subreddit, a woman tries to lend her sister a helping hand and immediately regrets it because her niece is a bad kid.
My (22F) sister (28F) recently moved in with me because she’s getting divorced and has nowhere to stay. She has a daughter (7F). I live in a two-bedroom apartment, so it’s cramped, and tensions are high.
My niece is terrible, to be honest. She screams all day long at the top of her lungs. I work from home, so I have tried to get my sister to stop, but she’s so depressed from her divorce that she struggles to get out of bed. I have asked my niece to quiet down, but she smirks at me and continues playing and screeching. I have gotten reprimanded at work for it.
She also recently broke my laptop. I clarified that my niece is prohibited from using my electronics, minus the living room TV. My niece got her hands on my laptop to play games, spilled milk all over it, and ruined it. I was furious, but my sister paid to replace it, so I let it go.
I have tried many times to talk to my sister about this being unacceptable but keep getting blown off and told to let her grieve in peace. I felt terrible for her, so I did my best to just put up with it.
Today I came home from errands to find my niece playing on my Nintendo Switch. Mind you; this was kept in my room, so she must have gone in there and looked for it. Annoyed, I held my hand out and told her to give it. She ignored me. I called for my sister to take care of her daughter, but she was asleep and told me to leave her alone.
So I grabbed the Switch from my niece’s hands and returned it to my room. She started screaming, crying, and rolling on the floor, but I ignored her. Well, she decided that was just not acceptable, so she took a Sharpie and drew it all over the living room wall. When I saw it, I freaked the f*ck out!
I told her she’s a spoiled f*cking brat. She started screaming and crying even worse, finally waking my sister up. She came out, and instead of being angry and scolding her daughter for her behavior, she scolded ME for yelling at her and calling her a spoiled brat.
Not my proudest moment, but I yelled at my sister that I was being kind by letting them stay with me rent-free, and I was being treated like absolute sh*t in return. She wasn’t parenting her child, and I wasn’t going to parent her child for her, so she needed to get her sh*t together and her daughter under control, or they could find somewhere else to stay.
Her daughter was not only getting me in trouble at my job but had no respect for my personal belongings, and now I was probably going to lose my security deposit because she didn’t accept the word “no.”
My sister started crying, called me an AH, and she and my niece haven’t come out of their room. I feel bad now.
AITA?
NTA (Not the A**hole) - pack up their things, tell them to find another place, and then get out. Tell the princess that she's not the first to go through a divorce and won't be the last.
NTA. Let them sulk in one room, solves a lot of your problems. Her grief over her divorce doesn't absolve her from being a parent. She needs to get her sh*t together.
NTA. Don’t wait too long to make her leave. Right now, you are risking your job and apartment. I’m sure your neighbors aren’t too happy about the screaming. Now the niece is damaging your property and apartment, costing you money. Your sister needs a wake-up call to get her and her daughter help. But you can’t be expected to destroy your life because of her divorce.