u/AshRoseEvans

The Real Villain is my Mother in Law

I apologize in advance for the novel you’re about to read, but a lot has happened in a year. And I apologize for any typos in this as well. I’m writing this at midnight.

So, its been more than a year since the last time I posted and boy to I have a LOT to update. Honestly, even as I write this I still can’t believe that this is honestly my life now. Thank you to everyone who’d left comments on my original post, I appreciate them, truly. And I had EVERY intention of doing everything that I said I would. 

However, between then and when I moved, shit hit the fan. And now, after I’ve moved and lived with my MIL, the shit that hit the fan splattered all over the walls, over everyone and more got tossed at the fan for good measure. But before I get started talking about all of the spicy tea, let me first update with the good news. 

First off, my daughter was born happy and healthy and is now 14.5 months old. We’ll call her Yoshi. It’s how I refer to her online via streaming and in my discord channel so let’s just keep it consistent. She got the nickname because she makes the Yoshi from Mario noise sometimes when making her little baby babbles and it’s the cutest thing. Her older siblings absolutely adore her and I may or may not be a little over protective of her, but I guess that’s what being a first time mom is like? Idk, it’s my first time. 

Anyway, on to juicier things. To recap the cast of characters, there’s me (now 31F), my husband Lee (43M), my mother Tammy (58F), my sister Jess (29F), and my brother Dan (26M) from the original post. We now have to add a handful of new ones. There’s my best friend, Jackie (35F), my oldest, TJ (12M), my second oldest Aria (10F), my father Mike (65M), Lee’s Uncle Teddy (?M) and my MIL Swamp Witch (60M). That’s her name in my phone and shall forever be known as such. Again, these are fake names. 

Now, onto what has happened over the last year and change. Since my last post, as I mentioned, I had a healthy baby girl who, despite everything, has been absolutely thriving. I’ve shared updates and photos of her with my stream followers on discord because I’m such a doting mother and she has the absolute cutest smile. I’m, quite literally, OBSESSED with my daughter. For the first few months, things were relatively okay. I was on maternity leave, planning to go back to work just before the summer ended and things were okay. Lee and I were planning out move south to live with my MIL for a while until we both got jobs and were able to move out. 

However, just as I went back to work, word came down that our landlady wanted us out. Reasons are still unknown, but it probably had something to do with the fact that we were only paying $1850 a month for rent and when we just saw it go up for availability, the rent was now $2800. The messiness of it was likely part of the issue, but I think the primary issue was that my husband’s late wife was gone and she had no reason to continue o be nice to us and wanted to up the rent. Whatever. 

With that information, we effectively moved in with Tammy. Bear in mind, Yoshi was only three months old the time this was happening. We moved in with her, she took care of the kids while Lee and I did our best to empty the house of anything and everything that we wanted and get rid of what we needed to get rid of. We took a trip with a U-Haul down south to Swamp Witch’s town and unloaded the truck into a storage unit with the help of his brother and Swamp Witch agreed to watch the dogs at her place while we grabbed the rest of our stuff, loaded up a pod, and took another truck down south. We officially moved into her spare room at the beginning of August.

And for a while, things were great. I got along with Swamp Witch and Teddy and the kids were having a blast. August I spent time scrambling to get the kids into school and find a job for me and Lee and September came and went. 

That’s when things started to get bad. 

Lee had always told me the kind of woman Swamp Witch was. She had neglected him as a child, lost him for three months one summer when he was around TJ’s age. And not to the state. He ran feral in the woods. Grant you, that was in the 90’s so it was a different world, but still. When you’re drunk and high off your ass and your husband beats the shit out of your son when he’s drunk… well you connect the dots there on your own. I was always told that she was just not a good person and would be kind to your face so long as she had a use for you, so long as she wanted something from you.

(I feel like I have to preface this next part with this, Lee would never have allowed her near his children if she wasn’t sober. The second his late wife was pregnant with TJ, he told her that she would either get clean or have nothing to do with his kids. To her credit at the time, she got clean and as far as we know, she’s not smoked anything but cigarettes since. Better than nothing, but still.)

Well apparently, my usefulness to her had worn out. That and probably the fact that it took me so long to warm up to her before mine and Lee’s wedding in 2024. She realized I couldn’t be fooled for long. It started, it *seemed* with something that Aria had done in good faith. One day, she’d gone out to feed the chickens and casually remembered that Swamp Witch always complained that the chickens flew out of their coop and would go into the woods behind her yard. She has 7 acres of land. So Aria, in her infinite and somewhat adorable wisdom, took the chicken feed and made a trail of feed from the chickens, back to their little pen. Except it wasn’t just a sprinkle. It was a water in thick, 6 in wide PATH of feed. 

Mildly annoying. She would have gotten a stern talking to from Lee and I about this and told to scoop it up and throw the feed into the pen and it would have been done with. Easy peasy, right? 

Wrong. 

Swamp Witch took in the scene and absolutely exploded on Aria. Made her cry and continued on yelling and yelling and yelling. And then she went and chewed Lee out about it. Claiming that the chickens feed was ruined and that was a 50 pound bag of feed wasted and blah blah blah. Except… the chickens eat the feed off the ground. They scratch it out of the trough and peck it up off the floor. 

She’d ended that whole ordeal of “Since you won’t make Aria take accountability for what she did, you can clean up her mess” to Lee. So he did. He went and took a shovel and scooped all that feed back into the pen. 

And guess what? 

The chickens fucking ate it. 

Cue the next several months of aggression against Aria, and the start of going after me and Yoshi. She’d complain about Aria to TJ and Aria would come to me and Lee and complain about it and Lee would do his best to protect her from it. Swamp Witch would through all kinds of insults at her, calling her a snitch while also saying that she didn’t care what Aria told me and Lee about what she said. 

Sure sounds like the actions of someone who doesn’t care. 

This was also around the time that she started to call me a pig. After I found out that she had told an Amazon driver who’d come to deliver a package I’d ordered that all I do is eat sleep and shit. In front of my husband who had been outside doing stuff. (He was naturally outraged.) 

The issue she had with me? I accidentally left a single piece of shredded cheese on the counter while making quesadillas for her, Teddy, my children, my husband and myself. I stuffed these things with delicious toppings. Teddy loved them. Probably started an addition. I made these several times a week. Sometimes with left over taco meat or chicken. Lee would make me sautéed mushrooms and bacon to stuff in them. Even made some with the Christmas Brisket we had. It was great. 

And I always ALWAYS did my best to clean up immaculately after I did. But because I missed a piece of cheese on the counter, I was a pig. A fat ass who did nothing but sit on her ass and eat and then crap it all out. I’m not a skinny woman. I’m big boned. My husband will affectionately call me (the stereotypical) Italian Nona shaped who’s leaning over a pot of sauce and always making pasta (I love pasta). And it’s kind of been a bit of an issue for me. Before I was pregnant I was over 200 pounds. After I gave birth, I actually got myself down to 180 and I was rather happy about it. But then I gained it all back and then some. And it was hard to shed it, especially since I was stress drinking soda again amidst all of this going on. Which is a nasty habit, I know. 

But she knew that it bothered me. I did my best to ignore it, Lee and I agreed that the best way to handle it was to not engage, because we were in her house and we needed to be there until we could afford to buy a house and move out, which had been our plan. 

However, the micro-aggressions continued. She told me I couldn’t use the eggs unless she had more than 2 dozen, because she sells them and that the “chickens pay for themselves” and I liked using them. I’d add them to the bacon and mushroom quesadilla’s and make a sort of breakfast one. 

So I stopped using the eggs. 

She continued complaining about me being in the kitchen, muttering little insults under her breath whenever I was in there. So I stopped cooking in there when shew as in there. She got a job during the day and when she was gone, I’d go out and cook quesadillas or microwave things or just generally not be cooped up in the room. I’d also shower when she wasn’t home. Three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday and then sometimes on Sunday when she went to church. I’d do laundry when she wasn’t home because it was the only time I would get some peace and quiet. 

But she didn’t want me to change the settings from quick wash. And I’m sorry… quick wash doesn’t clean the baby poop off a onesie from a blown out diaper. I forgot to change the settings back one time. 

She told me I couldn’t use the laundry machines anymore.

So I stopped. I started taking mine and Lee’s clothes to a laundromat once a week. Whatever. Money we didn’t want to spend while trying to get a job and get out of her house. But it would only be for a short time right? Wrong. 

Then a blow up happened. Lee and I went to the store. We had gone and gotten some groceries. She’d long since labeled me as the lazy fat ass who did absolutely nothing with her life. But fine. I’d stopped talking to her by the beginning of October. We were approaching November by this point. I was putting stuff in the fridge after we’d come back and I pulled open a drawer and was putting a 5 pound bag of fiesta blend Walmart cheese in. 

Her: You’d better not squish my tomatoes. 

Me: (calmly) I’m putting away groceries. 
Her: -mutters something about me being a bitch. Then turns to Lee- when you marry the next one, hopefully you can teach the new one some manners. 

Lee: She’s not the one here without manners. 

She started getting loud at that point, and my children were watching this whole exchange. She was trying to get a rise out of us, so she could play the victim, Lee and I knew this, knew that if we exploded back, were goaded into doing what she wanted, in front of TJ and Aria, we would be painted as the bad guys. So we tried. We tried so hard. Lee cooked and quietly went about her business while Swamp Witch tried her hardest to get in his way. 

While we were eating it happened. I don’t remember exactly what happened anymore since it was so long ago, but she’d called me a whore, told me that I was a bitch, a pig, any uncreative epithet you could think of while my children were there. I calmly did my best to point out her own faults and she immediately started laying the victim “I’m the bad guy. I’m the bad Mimi” you get the drill. I finally stood up for myself, which Lee told me to do because when she saw that she couldn’t push me around she would back off. When that didn’t work, she just started screaming “Get out, get out, get out” over and over again. Aria started bawling. Begged us to leave and cut Swamp Witch out of our lives forever. 

Finally managed to remove myself from the situation. TJ and Aria slept in mine and Lee’s room that night, Yoshi slept peacefully in her crib. 

Lee was very proud of me for doing that and knew it took a lot out of me. I’m an incredibly non confrontational person. 

Flash forward to the next day. I’m in the kitchen messing with something, I think I was prepping the sanitizer for the baby bottles or cleaning Yoshi’s food mashing binky thing. And she reached over my shoulder, nearly touching me to get a paper towel. When I automatically flinched away, thinking she might actually be stupid enough to hit me in front of my husband (who has said that if she laid a hand on me, he’d collapse her face without even thinking about it) she said “there’s only one queen in this house.” To which I responded with “I don’t see a queen. I just see a bully.” 

I was quite proud of that little mic drop. The outward aggression toward me stopped. However, the micro aggressions didn’t. She would talk just loudly enough on the phone when she was insulting me to her friends. She’d flip me off in the corner of my vision while I was walking past. She would mutter pig or bitch or counter under her breath when she was near me. She’d constantly bad mouth me to my kids. Saying I wasn’t their real mom, try to iterate the fact that I was their step mother. She told my fucking children that she hoped that me and Yoshi fell down and broke our necks. She tried to tell the kids that Yoshi wasn’t Lee’s daughter, despite the fact that Yoshi and Aria look EXACTLY THE SAME when Aria was her age. Yoshi also has blue eyes, like her siblings and her dad, whereas I have brown. She looks so much like Lee that when she was born, I did that I joked that I carried her for 9 months only for her to come out looking like this idiot (Lee) like the meme that went around for a while. Swamp Witch also told my kids that she didn’t acknowledge Yoshi as her granddaughter and blah blah blah. She also started to systematically take the stuff that we’d put around the house and either force us to put it in our tiny room or move it somewhere that made us have to take it out of the house and bring it to our storage unit. This woman had told us when we first moved in that she wanted us to be comfortable

Yeah, okay. Guess it’s as no longer convenient because we weren’t playing to her little tune anymore. 

The worst of all of her transgressions however, was when she FREAKED OUT that I stopped out of the shower and got her bath mat wet and apparently didn’t hang it up to dry when I was done. It was a whole big issue. Which is why I had to shower when she wasn’t home. And I’d take two towels. I’d move her towel out from in front of the shower, lay one towel down and then shower me and the baby, having Aria or Lee help me to dry take her and dry her off so I could shower myself. Then I’d pick up the towel I used as a bath mat, clean out everything I used from the shower and then go back into the bedroom. We had a pretty great system going on. But because she never SAW me shower three days a week, Tuesday, Thursday and Sunday (When she had work and went to church because she had Friday’s off) she would always comment that I stank and fan her nose when I walked passed as if I emanated some awful odor. I didn’t. Lee confirmed. 

Then she lost her job and I didn’t have any ability to shower anymore. We literally had to get a membership to the local YMCA so us adults could shower and wash Yoshi somewhat regularly.

This all escalated for months until nearly February. Between October and then, I’d gotten a job at a daycare and Yoshi went to work with me and Lee had gotten a job. And we’d been approved for a home loan. But then Lee had injured himself and was forced, with a doctors note to take three days off work to recover. He’d brought it in to work that day only to be told that he was fired for taking time off. He was in his probationary period and had taken two days off before due to inclimite weather and then one more because the door literally fell off of my car and he had to fix it. But you know, because he’s in security and two of those days were excused by the university he was working for, he’d still taken too many days off work and they fired him. So our house fell through, ended up losing our $2,000 earnest monies. Then in April I’d lost my job and had to start running Spark to make sure we could actually eat during the week. I’ve been doing that ever since and even now it’s starting to grate on me. 

Anyway, back off that tangent. Aria had gotten back into the good graces of Swamp Witch and TJ had fallen out because he’d grown wise to her bullshit and wasn’t willing to play along anymore. This was when Jackie, who’d I’d been in constant contact with since then had come “to the rescue” so to speak. She helped me find a rental house that was pet friendly. I submitted the application. Used the income I was getting from Spark and the income we were getting from Social Security to get approved for the rental. On June 5th, we got approved and brought the security deposit and the utilities paperwork with the help of Jackie. And we brought Aria and TJ to see the house we were renting. 4 bedrooms, 2 bath, with a fenced in yard. Rented for $2100 a month.  $300 more than we were paying for a 2 bed 1 bad apartment up north. Pretty good up grade if I say so myself. 

We had expressed to the children that Swamp Witch is not to know anything of what was happening until the day we were moving out and even after that. They weren’t going to tell her the town we were moving to, nothing. 

That was our mistake. Before this, we were VERY careful about not giving the kids information that we didn’t want to get back to Swamp Witch. We didn’t want to put them in a position where they would have to lie. But Lee said it would be fine, we would be moving in a week. It wasn’t a big deal. I’d wanted to leave them with Jackie and have them just hang out while we did the inspection on the house.

But we brought them. Aria, who’d been basically groomed by Swamp Witch as a little sleeper agent, had used her toy watch she’d gotten from Christmas two years ago by my grandmother that could take pictures, to take a picture of the house. It had “somehow” come up in conversation that we were moving and Aria had given her the picture. And Swamp Witch had reversed image searched and found the address of the house and the town. 

The five days between June 5th and June 10th where we’d decided would be out move in date, someone had called the county DFCS and told them that the kids were being neglected, Yoshi was sleeping in a tiny room with animals, Aria had lost three teeth and both kids had had rashes. 

Aria had lost three teeth. Baby teeth. She’s 10. This happened within several months. The kids had gotten rashes. When the heating kicked on and the dust from them irritated their skin, back in winter. We’d taken care of it with antihistamines. They were fine. Yoshi wasn’t in a dirty room with animals and eating their gross shit on the floor. Despite basically having to live in a tiny room, Lee and I did our absolute best to keep that room extra clean BECAUSE we had an infant, who’d quickly become a toddler. We knew it was her. But we didn’t escalate. 

That’s what she wanted us to do. She wanted, and still wants us to start a fight. She wanted a reason to play the victim. So we didn’t give it to her. It was a mutual agreement between Lee and I. And sure, sometimes it would grate on me that I was basically prisoner in a room, or that we had to run away from the house when she was home. But finally, there was a light at the end of the tunnel. 

I’d talked about it in my family group chat about all of this, everything that was going on. Tammy had said that she would be coming down to help move. I asked her to wait until the 20th. Finally, we started loading up the truck. She “helped” in the sense that she started going through her cabinets and gathering up EVERYTHING that was ours and tossing it somewhere. We emptied our room, I cleaned it up, mopped, swept, while holding a tired baby, while Lee loaded the 20 foot U-Haul we’d rented. Then Friday night on the 12th we rolled out late at night, finally. But not before, as I was walking out of that house for the last time, Swamp Witch followed me out of the house with both hands held up flipping me off and then said “bye, I hope you drop dead” as the door closed IN FRONT OF ARIA. What a shiny example of a human being. 

We had our dogs, cats, most of our critters except for the rabbits which she oh so graciously allowed us to leave while we were her unpacking and getting everything readied. (Also locked anything we couldn’t take back in the pod so Lee’s youngest brother who had apparently visited for the first time since we moved down here wouldn’t steal anything, namely Lee’s alcohol or fishing/hunting gear). 

All was right with our world, Tammy was waiting to come down here and visit until the 20th and bring down the rest of our stuff that we’d left up there. Until this past Thursday, where the DFCS of our new county had gotten an anonymous call about children being neglected, the house being an absolute pig sty, and that Yoshi SPECIFICALLY was failing to thrive. 

Yoshi is 20 freaking pounds, nearing 30 inches tall, running around, laughing, eating solid foods and living her best god damn life. I kept that precious child away from the toxicity that is Swamp Witch as best I could and she is better for it. She has no makers of a neglected and malnourished child. 

The DFSC agent came to the house on Thursday but the older two were hanging out with Jackie and her daughter and Lee and I were running errands with Yoshi after we’d finished spark. So he called us both. I missed the call because I have call filtering, but Lee got it, while we were scoping out the local Petco. The agent told us that someone had made the call with the following allegations, and Lee knew IMMEDIATELY what had happened. He talked to the agent, who seemed reasonable and told him that we know who called, or who had put someone up to making the call and that it was done entirely out of spite. 

The agent understood and said that we wouldn’t believe the amount of times that this has happened but because the buzz words were said that they needed to come and check it out and close the case. We asked when it needed to be done, willing to get it done and over with on Thursday. But he said that he would come bright and early Monday morning at 9:30. Bright and god damn early today from when I’m posting this and should probably go to bed and get some sleep but I’m just… too wired and can’t sleep. So I’m typing all of this out for you. 

But anyway. Monday at 9:30 am. Fine. We can do that. Tammy was coming Saturday with our stuff, a “new” dining room table and chair (hand me downs from my dads old apartment), and we would get that sorted and then go and deal with the DFSC case before going back to Swamp Witch’s house to unload the rest of the pod and get it gone before we had to pay another $400 for it for a month. 

The plan HAD been to go to the house with me and Lee, him driving the truck and me driving my car and I would go to the unit and load my van with stuff from the kitchen while Lee went to the house to empty the pod. But Tammy had other ideas. 

She rolled up this morning, Father’s Day, with my father in the truck. Keep in mind, they’d been divorced since I was 18. My dad, Mike, came down and drive ALL DAY in a vehicle with my mother. I’d proud of him, truly, but he was so done with her by the end of it. I would have been happier if having him here didn’t add another layer of stress. We had unloaded the truck, went to meet up with Jackie and her family for a Father’s Day lunch. 

Then we got down to brass tacks. Tammy has it in her head that she, Mike, and Lee would go to Swamp Witch’s together, while I stayed at the house with the kids and what not. They would empty the pod, drive up Lee’s car, and everything would be grand. Tammy was going to get a police escort because she feels threatened for me and would be there helping Lee empty the pod into the truck and then leave. (It’s a 3 hour drive from us to Swamp Witch. Lee and I wanted as much space as the state would allow between us and her.) But Swamp Witch has said that she did not want Tammy on her property. So that wouldn’t work. Lee and Tammy got into a heated discussion about what the plan would be. I tried to speak up in defense of Lee’s plan, but Tammy wasn’t listening to it. Me and Mike were kind of just… exchanging looks while this whole thing went down. 

Lee’s counter plan to Tammy’s plan was that we would ALL go down, since Tammy is the registered driver on the truck, and that they would get him to the property with the truck and then I would take Tammy, Mike, all three kids, and the stroller and go to a mall or something while Lee unloaded the pod into the truck. Because we don’t want Tammy to get a felony. And we don’t want to start a war. A war that Swamp Witch wants us to start that we are refusing to do so because it is driving her insane and causing her to self implode (hence the call to DFCS). 

Which is where we are currently at. We’re still unsure of what’s going to happen tomorrow and I’m a hot mess, I’m still unsure of what’s going on and I’m so emotionally drained that I’m feeling hardly a thing except for this unyielding rage towards Swamp Witch, which my family had talked me out of going Pro Revenge. At least for now. I know this DFCS case isn’t going to be anything to worry about but it’s still a layer of stress I didn’t want to deal with, and is going to make the process of loading and getting back to the house tomorrow to take way longer than it should. 

Anyway, that’s all for now. I’m sorry if things are a bit disjoined and jumbled up and I’m sorry if it’s confusing. Please ask questions and I’ll do my best to clarify if needed. I’ll update sometime tomorrow or the next day about what happens in the morning. Cross your fingers that it’s not going to go bad and Lee and I can keep Tammy and Swamp Witch from crossing proverbial swords. Because that’s just stress we really don’t want to get into. 

(Also, I will tell you in my next update what the pro revenge would be. And y’all can tell me if it’s “pro revenge” or if it would be nuclear revenge or not. But either way, I’m still on the fence about doing it after everything she’d done to me and what she’s said and is still saying about my kids.) 

Again, sorry this turned out to be an absolute fucking novel. I knew as I started writing this that it would be long, just not exactly HOW long it would be. I also apologize again for any typos in this. it’s 1am. Any advice on what I can do tomorrow/today about the absolute shit show I’m about to enter into would be very much appreciated. Thank you in advance, fellow potatoes.