People Share The Worst Decision They've Seen A Loved One Make

When You Have Everything But Still Want To Throw It Away

“I had a friend who graduated high school and had scholarships to a great college. Her mom and dad were rich, so she had everything handed to her. She had opportunities that some people only dream of having.

Instead of going to college, she decided to throw it all away. She started stealing money from her dad and got involved in all sorts of shady behavior. She started hanging with a very rough crowd, started dressing like in skimpy clothes, and got knocked up. The guy that knocked her up had been in jail a few times already for dealing. Her dad provided money to her to help care for the child, but she would spend it on tattoos and clothing. Her baby-daddy hit her on multiple occasions. She got hit in the face so hard that she had to go to the emergency room.

One night, they went to a local bar and she brought her baby. She had no clue that he was strapped and was planning on murdering someone at the bar. He got caught before he could shoot the guy. He wasn’t even supposed to have access to weapons because of his previous convictions. They both got arrested. Her dad had to come pick up the baby. They had to go through a custody battle and he got full custody. She, fortunately, didn’t go to jail, but she is back with that same crowd and constantly complains about how her baby-daddy abandoned her even though she was his one true love! Her dad had to kick her out of the house since she refused to get a job and be responsible. She doesn’t care that she doesn’t have custody of her son.”

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So Now She Wants To Come In And Be The Good Daughter

“My grandma had a stroke, so her kids all came down to help except for the one who lived out of state.

A few months in, she decided to move back, take over everything, and before we knew it, she loaded my grandma up in her car and drove her out of the state without saying anything to anybody, drained the account so that they could afford a new home, and started pulling money from the grandkids’ inheritance.

My grandma has dementia, can barely tell right from wrong, and was manipulated into thinking that she was abandoned by her family. Meanwhile, she was telling us that she still lived in the city at her house while they were taking care of grandma. We went to the aunt’s house, and her place had a sign out front that said the power was being cut off due to not having paid any bills in weeks. We knocked, rang, and asked the neighbors where they were. They told us nobody lived there, so we called her phone number and the number was disconnected.

My grandma is still being manipulated but has moments of lucidity. My family has a grudge against her because they think she went willingly, meanwhile, she’s calling us crying because she has no money and she misses us, then she flips back to thinking we hate her. No, we hate the aunt that took her.

I’m wondering if this even counts as kidnapping since my grandma is senile and she barely thinks for herself anymore.”

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Sometimes Enough Is Enough… Even With Family

“I’ll write about this one until my dying day if only so someone might avoid making the mistakes my sister made.

Her first bad decision was playing follow the leader with a friend at work. She and the other girl both lost their jobs for time fraud.

The second bad decision was in switching from weed to uppers. First, it was minor stuff, and then she was using bath salts. A minor seizure seemed to snap her out of it, but by then she was used to the artificial high.

She switched to Adderall. Her supplier got her to try other stuff, harder stuff. Adderall stopped working.

She found speed, and the rest of her life became unimportant. Her kids were a burden, and her husband was to blame for everything she saw wrong in her life (he was abusive, but so was she, and she stayed because he had money and she hadn’t worked in over five years).

My parents ignored it. I tried to talk sense into her, it did nothing.

She started stealing from our parents. Then she stole from stores, got really good at it too. She switched from smoking speed to shooting it up.

I got used to cleaning up after her when she left used needles in the bathroom.

She stole my credit cards out of a locked safe when we went on vacation as a family. She went home early, and the next day I had hundreds of dollars in charges, and she had a new cat.

The final straw came when my parents and I took my grandma on a seven-day cruise right before Christmas. It was awesome. We came home, unloaded the suitcases from the car, and brought them into my grandma’s house.

The place was trashed.

My sister broke in, let her dealer stay for the week and spent over 20 grand of my gran’s money. Tried to open new cards after attempting identity theft. Dug through everything in the house, stole all of the jewelry she could, including stuff from when my gran was a kid.

The police were called.

In the time that followed, she was arrested for shoplifting, crashed three cars – once with her daughter in the front seat. They finally found the substances. She couldn’t lie her way out of that so finally, she was sent packing to prison.

She spent roughly four months there before being moved to a rehab center. She has a slew of mental disorders, addictions, and other issues. She can see her kids for a few hours on the weekend. Our parents can visit her, but I won’t. I don’t have it in me to see her. She was my best friend, but I don’t know her now. I haven’t known her in years.

I don’t forgive her for the hurt. I still see a spoiled brat who blames everyone but herself. It’ll be a long time before I talk to her again.”

“

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He Loved His Uncle, He Just Didn’t Want To Make The Same Mistakes

“My uncle is a tail-end baby boomer. He grew up in a time where he could get a relatively well paying job easily. He doesn’t have any education beyond high school, but he’s pretty good with lights and rigging and all that. He’s always been a musician, and a lot of his life revolves around playing sets and stuff like that. When he had his first kid at nearly 50 though, things changed pretty quickly. Through a friend, he was able to get a very good job at a local hospital fixing wiring and the like. It was a full-time job, it was a long-term job, it had benefits, vacation time, and it paid around $60,000 a year. All things considered, he hit the jackpot.

The job was strenuous of course, but no more so than a typical non-patient related hospital gig. He worked there for like six months, and everything was going pretty well. The bosses really liked him, because he was a fast worker and dependable. He’s very funny, so he always got along with people well. He was even being left in charge more and he had even gotten a couple of additional duties. He didn’t love having more work, but it could have been indicating that he was being prepped for a promotion. Then, he a heard a rumor from a co-worker that the company may be looking to make some cutbacks. So to save himself and the company trouble, my uncle quit that day. He didn’t confirm these rumors with his boss or talk things over with him. He just walked out.

Now, I don’t know how true the rumor was, but I know it certainly cost him his unemployment or a potential severance package, or even if he would have been fired at all. He justified it as him being the newest hired employee but that’s far from a sure thing. Even if the rumor was true. He also claimed it was so he could spend more time with his then-infant son, which I understand, but still can’t agree with what he did.

I think the job was harder than what he was used too, so he took off. He also definitely blamed the president at the time (Obama) for the world changing and making it so he couldn’t find another good job like that as he easily as he could in the past.

I love my uncle a lot, but God forgive me if I ever end up like him.”

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Sometimes It’s Best To No Follow In Your Parents’ Footsteps

“I watched my mom make poor decision after poor decision leading herself to ruin.

It started with her husband getting fired for skipping too much work. But they can’t acknowledge that they were ever the ones making poor decisions. Then my mom got fired and decided to stay at home because she was tired all the time.

Her husband got a new job, didn’t show up, and got fired. My mom still doesn’t want a job, gets evicted for not paying rent, ‘but the owner was being mean, and he should just wait till she can pay.’ Then she gets choosy as to what facilities her new home must possess.

He car gets totaled. She had the money to completely pay off on a reliable car, but saw a BMW for sale and took out a loan.

This vicious cycle continues. The car has a minor issue that is more expensive to fix because of make and model. She doesn’t want to fix it, so now she has no working car.

She wants a new bed? Time to drain the retirement fund.

Christmas time comes up, they are tired of the grind and take out a $5,000 loan to buy Christmas presents. They don’t send out the gifts, end up getting evicted, and put all of their belongings and gifts in storage. They don’t pay for storage and have all of their assets seized.

Now she lives in an abandoned trailer with a partial roof and no utilities in her ex-husband’s backyard while my 13-year-old sister is forced to live with and share a bedroom with her manipulative and verbally abusive father in a three-bedroom house with three other families and no working toilet.

I have tried to get her to stay with my husband and me. We are able to provide for her what they can’t. A stable home, healthy food, safe environment, her own room. I even offered to pay to fly her out (since we live a few states away). But my mom fights everything and convinces my sister that staying with us would be worse.”

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The Great Compost Incident

“My mother-in-law, who I’ll call Dementora, is now in her late 80s and was married until my father-in-law died very unexpectedly ten years ago. He was an orphan who grew up with no family and became a very successful businessman through hard work and natural charisma.

He bought an amazing house back in the ’70s. A classic English thatched cottage built in 1750, in a beautiful picture postcard village, with half an acre of English country garden. It was very important to him as a home, and a symbol of him having made a success of his life. This is important as he wanted my husband to inherit it, and our kids after him.

Now Dementora was not born posh nor rich but decided that she should have been. She acquired all the airs and graces of being landed gentry: changed her name, her accent, her backstory. She became very snooty and would condescend to anyone with less money than her, yet grovel in front of ‘important’ people like lawyers, magistrates etc. Also important.

They had two kids. My husband’s sister was always, always the scapegoat, while my husband was somewhere between golden child and forgotten child. He was sent away to an awful boarding school. Once he ran away from there and she promised to pick him up but called the Headmaster instead, who dragged him back. She also refused to ‘make a fuss’ when a teacher tried to touch him inappropriately. Just your classic English posh people upbringing. Husband’s sister has been no contact since about 1990.

Dementora was always a passive aggressive witch, and obviously felt I was wrong for my husband. She burst into tears the first time I met her and was very cross about us getting pregnant. Our daughter is still fondly referred to as ‘You’re joking!’ due to Dementora’s response on hearing the news.

We lived in another country for 15 years before it became clear that Dementora wasn’t managing and it was getting too complex to fly back all the time and sort out whatever she needed doing. So, after a lot of thought and hours of discussion with Dementora, we decided to move back to England and share the family home with her. She’d been there for 40 years and would struggle with change. We drew up contracts with lawyers, invested tens of thousands of pounds in renovating the house, splitting it into two homes.

Oh what fools we were! We kept on making excuses for her. ‘She’s adjusting’, ‘She’s elderly, ‘She’s maybe got a touch of dementia’. We rugswept so much that our rugs were mountainous. She constantly, constantly, tried to drive wedges between all of us. She was unforgivably cruel to my daughter who was going through post-degree depression. She treated me like a servant and my entire extended family as impoverished courtiers, but we kept on trying: housework, gardening, odd jobs, Sunday lunches, endless listening to her constant vortex of negativity sucking the happiness out of everything (hence her name), helping her through elective surgeries (touch of Munchausen’s too, gotta get that attention somehow!) et-freaking-cetera. We were seriously considering selling our house in our home country and buying somewhere nearby so we could cope. She was constantly in our kitchen, complaining about everything, intimately harassing any visiting men; including our son-in-law, forcing gifts-with-strings on us and freaking out when we wouldn’t take them, insisting we were destitute and unemployed (wut?). It was driving me crazy because I still believed I could use rationality to cope. Yes, I am a summer child.

And then The Great Compost Incident happened.

My husband was on a conference call in his home office and I was in my kitchen with my sis and her two littlest kids. Dementora barges in, very cross because my husband hasn’t moved a bag of compost off the driveway and ‘what will people think.’ I roll my eyes and explain that he’s working but will do it in a minute. After twenty minutes or so, he comes in, listens, moves the compost. End of story, right?

Hahahahhahaha. Nope.

She starts ranting at him, in front of my pre-school nieces whose eyes widen as my sis ushers them out of the room. Enough. I use my sternest quiet voice. ‘Dementora, I have guests. You can’t do this now. Let’s deal with it later’.

Lol, like that would work. Dementora cranks it up a notch because she has an audience.

‘Dementora, you need to take your bad mood somewhere else. My nieces are here and you are complaining about nothing, the compost has been moved. Seriously, let’s talk later’. She complains some more then slams the door on her way out. Same crap, different day. I was actually looking forward to a few days’ peace before she’d waltz back in as if nothing had happened

And that was it. She went to her solicitor and invoked her right to sell the house. Nothing my husband could do would persuade her otherwise. He tried to reason with her for about a week but she insisted I had shouted at her (nope) and she could never forgive me.

So, she moved out two weeks later, with her hoard of unused purchases. The family home that my father-in-law had loved so much was placed on the market. It cost us thousands as she kept trying to take us to court to make us sell (note: we didn’t resist at any point) and we had to maintain a house and garden that we knew we were going to lose for over a year, with constant criticism via her lawyer that we weren’t doing it right.

Despite her insisting on no contact via her solicitor, she continued to leave voicemail rants/emotional blackmail for my husband, and send vitriolic emails to my family; we had to send cease and desist letters. We have been no contact since June 2016, only ever communicating via solicitor.

We’re back home in our lovely, ordinary house with no bad juju. And Dementora? She’s entirely alone and less able to cope than ever. She, as far as I know, is sitting in her rented house which is not at all posh, surrounded by unpacked boxes and the hoard of mail order crap that she buys compulsively. She has lots of money but she has no friends and no family, apart from an older sister who is very infirm – and they hate each other anyway. She got what she wanted. She sold our home, losing it for herself in the process, all because she wanted the right to shout in my kitchen, in front of small children, about her only son failing to move a bag of compost for twenty minutes.

Endnote: she finally sent a handyman round to get the bag of compost six months after she moved out. I hope it’s her most treasured possession because it cost her everything.”

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A Series Of Very Terrible Decisions

“My mom is a mostly functional heavy drinker. A few years ago, she came down with some minor sickness and the doctor gave her some pills for treatment. She took her medication, drank a glass of Merlot, and felt fine, so the next night, she took her pills and downed a bottle and a half.

The next morning, my mom came down the stairs stumbling still absolutely hammered. At the time, I was going to a school out of town, so I needed my mom to drive me to the bus stop. I tried to convince my mom not to take me, but it was no dice. She’s a nasty lady when she’s wasted, and she said I was being a lazy witch and just didn’t want to go to school.

I conceded and went to wait for her in the car. Five minutes later, my mother came out naked from the pants down.

She got in the driver’s seat and started yelling at me basically blaming me that she had peed herself and couldn’t find a single pair of pants or underwear in the laundry room. I tried to convince her to go to her room and find some pants but she said if we stayed any longer I would miss the bus.

Surprise surprise, albeit her phenomenal decision-making skills, we pulled up to the bus stop and the bus was long gone. So my mother, instead of doing the smart thing – going back to our house and calling me out of school because there was no way she should be driving – decided if she went this far naked she could drive another 45 minutes that way.

So after a very long, terrifying drive, we finally started to near the exit. Then my mom’s tire rolled over something and BOOM it exploded. My mother, determined that I get my education, continued driving on the rim of her tire for another five minutes. Meanwhile, people were shouting at us out their windows, honking, and motioning for us to pull over.

As expected, we got pulled over. My mom was freaking out trying to find a towel or a blanket, anything to cover herself, but she had no such luck. The cop came over and she had no choice but to roll down her window.

The first thing out of his mouth was: ‘License and registration Pl-MA’AM ARE YOU WEARING PANTS?!’

My mom didn’t get arrested. She told the officer about her sickness and just got a couple tickets. He never really suspected drinking was a part of it. I was like 14 at the time, but very small, and my mom could easily overpower me. I knew if I got her too angry before the ride her driving would only be worse. The cop had my dad pick my mother and me up.”

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“He Doesn’t Seem To Care Who He Hurts In The Process”

“My family took in a guy we’d known for years. He was the same age as my younger brother and had grown up near us. He fell on some hard times that resulted in him being stabbed by a friend of his. After the stabbing, we let him stay with us. He got clean, started exercising, got a new job, and we all spent a lot of time together. He was like a brother to me for a while.

He and my brother moved out into an apartment with some other guys from the place they worked. Their apartment was sparse, almost no food in the fridge and the pride of their place was the collection of empty bottles they’d saved. It was a bit trashy, but not unexpected for an apartment full of young single guys.

With the new freedom and money coming in from his job (and money from the settlement of the stabbing), he started getting back into his old ways. My brother was fine with the weed and drinking but started drawing lines when he saw harder stuff in the apartment.

When my brother saw crack for a second time, he started moving out. The other guys in that place followed suit because they were seeing the change as well. My brother told him that he needed to find new roommates to take over the lease. The guy brought in his dealer. Now my brother was still on the lease for a place he was not actually living in because the dealer obviously couldn’t be approved by the complex. I’m sure they spotted all the red flags.

But the dealer moved in any way. The two of them started spiraling down and they adopted pit bulls with the idea that the dogs would protect them from anyone trying to evict them because they stopped paying rent. This guy had also been borrowing an old used car from the family of another former roommate and now he refused to give it back.

I went with my brother to file a police report about it all. Luckily, with the police report and some of the guys trying to reason with the complex, most were able to avoid having any of this go on their credit history.

I stopped talking to him. I think my brother has seen him maybe once or twice since then, and the guy seems to be doing better. He’s married with kids now, and I haven’t heard about any issues through the grapevine.

For me, though, I never wanted to get in touch again because it feels like he could easily spiral down again and when he’s like that, he doesn’t seem to care who he hurts in the process.”

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A Family Torn Apart… By Nintendo

“My sister and I were really close with our cousins. My family went to Disneyland Paris one day, and we went with a camper which we hired from my uncle’s camper rental company.

After the four-day trip, we went back home and we turned in the camper again. A day later, my sister and I realized we both forgot our Nintendo DS’s in the camper, so my dad called my uncle to ask him if they were still in the camper.

My uncle said that they weren’t in the camper and that he had no idea where they were.

A few months later, my dad called my uncle again to ask if he had found the devices, to which my uncle replied that he had indeed just found them in the camper.

When we got our Nintendos back, we wanted to play with them, and immediately saw our cousins’ names on all the save files in nearly every game, which obviously proved that my uncle was lying, considering some of the save file dates coincided with the date we turned in the camper.

My uncle and my dad got into a big fight because of that, resulting in my sister and myself completely losing contact with our cousins. It’s been about 10 years since then, and we still have no contact with them.

To this day, it makes me mad that such a stupid lie has ruined my relationship with my cousins.”

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When Your Mom Doesn’t Want To Act Like A Mom

“My mom started seeing someone a month after my dad and her husband of 16 years died of cancer. Obviously, she was cheating on my dad, as she had most of my life. Two months in, she got a tattoo dedicated to an X-Men character with the new guy’s initials on it. She doesn’t like X-Men and only got it because she was a man-pleaser.

They eventually got married. I’m happy for them and witness their wedding. The marriage lasted two years. She of course cheated on him too, and they divorced despite the guy wanting to fix the marriage. She’s got some serious commitment issues. I tried to talk the guy out of it because he’s a genuinely good guy and my mom is a manipulative, pathological liar that thrives off sympathy and attention from others.

She now has a new boyfriend, and her now ex-husband is left to pick up the pieces of a failed marriage. He’s a good person. I like him, and I told him that he deserved better than her, but he can’t help that he loves her. The whole marriage really messed him up. He’s doing great financially, and physically he’s never been better. But, I know how badly my mom hurt him and I’ll probably never forgive her for her crappy actions and infidelity. Hopefully, he can move on and find new love with someone better.”

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They Should Put Him In A Home… With Padded Walls

“My cousin has bounced from family member to family member because of what he believes are ‘unlivable living conditions.’

In the past year, he has moved between his dad and stepmom’s house, his biological mother’s house, my family’s house, his girlfriend’s parents’ house, and just recently my grandparents’ house.

At first, it was a case of my cousin crying about ‘not feeling safe/being abused’ by his father and stepmother. My cousin is an 18-year-old lazy bum who sits around playing video games. No job, doesn’t try in school, lives off of whoever is supporting him, and lies and tries to manipulate until he gets his way. The ‘abuse’ he mentioned was his dad and stepmom telling him to get off his butt to help around the house, to work harder in school, and to get his drivers license so he could get to and from college the following year.

He refuses to get a job because ‘he has anxiety,’ even though his dad spends tons of money on anxiety medication. He dropped out of his second term of community college (was taking two online courses) to ‘help his girlfriend take care of her grandmother,’ and not a week later the same grandmother he was ‘helping’ kick him out of her house.

After the first three or four moves, he wasn’t leaving because of his woes about the people supporting him, but because he refused to change his lifestyle, sucked the time, energy, and money out of whoever took him in and was just a little jerk to anyone despite all they did for him. He even tried to sue his own father for child support when his dad was already paying his way while he lived with his biological mom.

He pulled the same old stuff until he wore people out, then when they confronted him about it he would just nasty and look for a short-term solution, and the instant a possible solution presented itself, he would burn bridges. He would cuss out his stepmom and use racial slurs, told his dad he would sue him for child support when his dad refused to give him $500 a month, and so much more, then would have the nerve to ask to move back in with them when it was his only option.

With nowhere left to go, he turned to my grandparents, who are the nicest, sweetest people I know. Two days. It took only two days of living with them before they called his dad and said to remove him from their home.

The kicker? Literally not one actually bad thing has ever occurred that wasn’t my cousin’s doing. He would throw a fit and move to the next sucker over next to nothing. When he was staying at our house, he did nothing but play my PlayStation in the basement. The reason he desperately pleaded to get away from me and my parents was because one night, on a school night for him, I had a friend over and we played the PlayStation so he couldn’t. That was his ‘breaking point,’ and what he considers a valid reason to need to move to a new home.”

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Some People Completely Lack Self-Control

“I watched a few friends get really into coke, and it was pretty tough.

It totally changed our nights out and just the whole vibe of our friend group. It got particularly bad when we could tell two of our friends were pretty much just hooking up and flirting with guys because they knew they had product. So they’d pretty much ditch us after they took their first bump, because now they’re just chasing that feeling.

It was sad watching their personalities and lifestyles change as a result of the stuff – baggy eyes, constantly exhausted on the weekends, and strapped for cash because they blew money. No offense to some guys out there, but also hooking up with skeezy looking guys that were, frankly, less than attractive. But guess what? They had blow.

I’ve seen people heavily romanticize coke usage likes it’s basically the same thing as weed. And I’m sure someone can do a little every Friday and have zero issues. That’s all well and good, I do know there are people like that who have remarkable self-control, and can somehow skate around the danger. I’ve just personally witnessed a few people become much worse versions of themselves because of coke, so I have a personal aversion to it.”

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You Can Only Help Those Who Want To Be Helped

“My brother torpedoed his 15-year marriage because he was too stubborn and egotistical to go to counseling with his now ex-wife.

He tried to lie to our family and say that she walked out on him until the girl he’d been cheating with let it slip during a family visit that he walked out because he didn’t want to try anymore.

His ex used that in the divorce, ended up getting full custody of their two kids, and raked him over the coals for infidelity and adultery.

Now, most of our family don’t talk to him, and the last I heard, he’s in some pretty deep financial trouble. Sucks to be him.”

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