AIW for demanding my cousin pay the full price for a professional tennis racket after she let her kid ruin it?
I’m currently dealing with a massive family headache because of an incident that happened last Saturday. I’ve been playing tennis competitively since high school, and it’s basically my main hobby outside of my job. Because of this, I don't buy cheap sports gear from regular supermarkets. My current racket is a professional-grade model that cost me nearly three hundred and fifty dollars, plus the cost of custom stringing and tensioning which I get done at a local pro shop. It’s perfectly weighted for my game, and I treat it with a lot of care, always keeping it in a padded thermal cover when I’m not on the court.
Over the weekend, my cousin came over to my place with her six-year-old son to drop off some paperwork for my mom. While we were sitting in the kitchen having a coffee, her kid got bored and started wandering around the apartment. I didn't think much of it because my place is mostly child-proofed, but I completely forgot that I’d left my tennis bag unzipped in the hallway closet after my practice session the night before. A few minutes later, we heard this horrible, rhythmic scraping and banging sound coming from the concrete driveway outside my front door. I ran out to see what was happening and my heart flat-out stopped. Her kid had dragged my racket out of the bag and was literally using it like a hockey stick, dragging the frame face-down across the rough asphalt gravel and smashing it into large stones to "launch" them into the yard.
By the time I snatched it away, the damage was completely unfixable . The protective bumper guard at the top was entirely shredded, the carbon fiber frame was deeply gouged and cracked in two places from the impact with the stones, and the custom strings were frayed and snapped. The structural integrity of the frame is completely gone, meaning the racket is literal garbage now. I was furious but tried to keep my cool, calmly explaining to my cousin that this wasn’t a cheap plastic toy and that she needed to reimburse me for the replacement cost.
She immediately got defensive and laughed it off, saying it’s "just a racket" and that I could easily buy another one at Walmart for twenty bucks. When I told her the actual price and showed her the online listing for the exact model, her attitude completely changed. She accused me of trying to scam her, saying no normal person spends that much on tennis gear and that it’s my fault for leaving it where a child could find it. Now, my aunt is calling my mom, claiming I’m being greedy and hostile toward a little kid who "didn't know any better." They're offering to give me fifty dollars to buy a basic replacement, but I told them I want the exact model paid for in full or I’m not letting them come over again. My family is split, with some saying I should just let it go to keep the peace, but I don’t see why I should eat a three hundred dollar loss because of her terrible parenting. AIW?