In my freshman year at college, I was roommates with my older sister (3 yrs older). My mother always found fault with my sister and sabotaged her attempts at independence. My sister would secretly win favor with me and we would make fun of my mother behind her back. I was ultimately still loyal to my mother, and ended up playing a part in an ugly plot between the two.
My mother became convinced that my sister was on meth and that she would soon become a sociopath and kill all of us for drug money. Realistically, she was probably mostly just drinking, and possibly screwing around with various drugs but probably nothing crazy. My mother was absolutely obsessive about the situation, and I could not even talk to my parents without her taking the phone and telling me about all the horrible things that were going to happen. I was not really capable of exercising boundaries and so it just continued and was very stressful.
They talked to my sister directly about it, she dismissed it. I tended to believe that my sister was most definitely not on meth but also was keeping me in the dark about her actual habits. I was caught in the middle. My father was no help because he was completely passive and would go along with everything that my mother was saying.
My mother eventually convinced me that my sister was going to die if we didn't take serious action. In fairness to that theory, my sister did have a heart attack a few years later, either from drug abuse, or-- as she claimed-- from trying to self-medicate thyroid issues with drugs purchased online. But back to the situation-- my mother proposed that I do some CSI shit like swab my sister's bedroom walls for residue and they would send it in to some fancy drug testing place. She wanted to find something incriminating and contact the police, to set my sister straight.
I don't actually remember if I proposed it, or if they did. But I offered to install a keylogger on my sister's computer while she was out. I configured it to send the results to an email controlled by my parents. My mother got all her passwords-- Facebook, Gmail, WoW, etc. Instead of finding something incriminating right away, however, it just became a constant channel where my mother couldn't control herself from watching everything my sister was doing online. Then when I spoke to my parents, my mother would gossip about what a disgusting person my sister was and how she was a slut and a trainwreck and on and on.
Eventually I moved out into my own place, and it was still going on. I told my mother that I refused to hear her talk about it any longer. I haven't heard about it since, and I don't know if my mother ever stopped looking, if my sister changed enough of her passwords and so on.
I don't really talk to anyone in my family any longer. I have yet to come clean to my sister. This was probably almost ten years ago. I have put it out of my mind for a long time, but it might be time to own up to the part I played in this. I think I ought to call out my parents on what they did, at least tell them that I think what they did was wrong. And I think I ought to come clean to my sister as well. And also make sure that it's not still going on (seems unlikely, but depending on my sister's password habits and all the spare time my mother has, it could theoretically still be going on).
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[–] 5673920? 0 points 2 points 2 points (+2|-0) ago
Wow, your mother sounds insane.
[–] 5674009? [S] ago
Unfortunately I was fairly insane myself at the time, and so behaved in a way that I now find to be morally wrong.
[–] 5674044? 0 points 1 point 1 point (+1|-0) ago
That tends to happen when people grow up. Some people just don't. Glad that you feel that way now.