Woman Doesn't Want to Babysit Her Boyfriend's 12-Year-Old Son — Here's Why

The woman in this #storyoftheday was caught in a difficult situation merely three months into a new romantic relationship when her boyfriend unexpectedly assumed the full custody of his child.

The popular AITA thread in the website Reddit was created for people that is going through an internal dilemma about difficult decisions that have not only angered others but have also made them doubt their own judgment.

The dynamics of the forum involve a person exposing their case to the more than 30,000 Reddit users that frequent the sub-reddit, which dates back to 2013, ready to offer their wisdom and comment on the situation in question.

On October 21, 2020, an anonymous female user that used the nickname of Elon Musk (not to be confused with the famous technology mogul), took to the thread to determine whether she had acted wrong amid a relationship issue.

“Musk,” age 27, started by telling fellow Reddit users that she had been in a relationship with her boyfriend, age 40, for seven months, sharing that he has a 12-year-old son from his previous marriage.

Due to the teenager presenting behavioral issues, as Musk tells, her boyfriend obtained full custody of his child and took him to live with him, but Musk never expected that it was going to make a big impact on the relationship’s dynamic.

As the woman continued, her boyfriend’s job is at a bat at nights, from 3 PM to 11 PM, so she made the mistake of, basically due to her boyfriend making her feel guilty, agreeing to watch the child in the beginning, something that her boyfriend rapidly took advantage of.

What started with Musk doing a favor for her boyfriend of less than a year, soon “turned into something that is just expected of [her].” Now, she went on to write, she feels “chained to his 1 bedroom apartment.”

“His son plays video games all day, does not want to talk to me, does not want to leave the house to do activities. I basically make him food and he says thanks and keeps playing video games,” Musk complained.

As a consequence of these last four months, Musk has come to feel “miserable, resentful, and depressed,” but a recent incident made her reach the limit of her patience, when she had an emergency with her grandmother and had to leave the child alone for a few hours.

Her grandmother suffers from dementia, and contrary to what happens with her boyfriend’s son, Musk does feel that she shares a responsibility for her grandmother, so she didn’t doubt it when she was needed to help her.

Still, she took the time to leave the 12-year-old a plate of spaghetti in the fridge, ready to be microwaved and eaten whenever he got hungry. But to her surprise, what the child did was telling his father that she did not feed him.

Instead of taking her side, and recognizing the job that she was doing only out of consideration for him, Musk’s boyfriend reprimanded her for not having made sure that his son was fed, and accused her of being “unreliable.”

Now, the woman is not willing anymore to take care of the child, and she considers that it was irresponsible for her boyfriend to take full custody of his child if he doesn’t have the time to be with him.

Unsurprisingly, most of the users in the forum conceded that Musk was right to not submit herself to the task of babysitting her boyfriend’s ungrateful son, with a user telling her that “the only person who is ‘unreliable’ and not doing their ‘job’ [was her] boyfriend.”