Neighbor Wars·
THE GROUP CHAT DRAMA
An exhausted new mom agrees to babysit a neighbor's children, triggering a cascade in a mom group that tests boundaries and prompts a sharp stand on support.
Should she keep babysitting or draw the line?
Be one of the first to vote.
The trouble started with a desperate knock and ended in a group chat pile-on over who was supposed to babysit whom.
A new mom, still only a little over a month into a mommy-and-me group in her area, had made a few friends there while caring for her 9-week-old. Then, last week, one neighbor asked for help in an emergency: could she watch the woman's 3-year-old and 5-year-old children?
The poster said yes. The neighbor "looked desperate," and she figured it was "its just once." So she took the kids in.
The day was rough. Her own daughter was fussy, the other children were rambunctious, and the house turned into a long stretch of noise and exhaustion. Six hours later, the neighbor finally picked the kids up, and the poster was relieved to hand them back.
Then came the second ask.
The neighbor later wanted her to watch the children in the afternoons on a regular basis. The poster said no.
She explained that she was not a full-time babysitter and did not want to spend that much time away from her own child or take on more responsibilities. When the neighbor brushed it off as "just the afternoons," the poster pushed back: "it may not be a lot to her but it is a lot to me."
She also said her husband works from home and needs the house quiet, and that she was a new mom who was not interested in taking on anything else right now. "I'm a new mom and I'm not interested on taking on any other responsibilities other than what I have right now," she wrote.
That was enough to set off the neighbor, who called her selfish and seemed to expect help simply because she was home with her baby. The poster summed up the attitude bluntly: "I should help her just because I'm at home with my little one."
The situation might have stayed between the two of them, except it spilled into the group chat. In an edit, the poster said the neighbor tried to disparage her there too.
The other moms pushed back fast. One asked why the neighbor thought the poster had any responsibility as a stay-at-home mom to watch her children. Another said the neighbor had tried the same thing with her before and had been told that "SAHM mom's in the group are not her babysitters and she needs to make arrangements for childcare independent of the group."
Then the moderator stepped in. The creator told the neighbor that "it would might be best if she found another mom group to socialize with." After that, the neighbor backtracked and apologized.
The moderator also told the poster that if the neighbor contacted her or another mom for this reason again, she would be expelled from the group.
The poster ended by thanking people for their support and saying she was still adjusting to a new life as a mom and wife after being a college student just a year earlier.