A woman is wondering if she’s “living in the twilight zone” after her brother got mad — instead of agreeing with her — for scolding his son when the boy wouldn’t stop prank calling her phone.
The aunt explained on Reddit’s “Am I the A——” forum that her 10-year-old nephew and his friends were incessantly calling her via FaceTime.
“We’re talking 30 calls in 45 minutes,” the woman recalled, adding that she had politely asked them to “please stop” because she was at an “important event” for work. However, the calls kept coming.
“I contacted my brother and sister-in-law asking for them to intervene, which they didn’t at first because of a call they were on, and I kept getting the calls for another 30 minutes, at which point I said, ‘Guys, enough, knock it off and get me off this call before your parents get involved.’ They finally stopped,” she said before detailing how the relief was short-lived.
The aunt noted that the “harassing” prank calls from her nephew’s friends persisted the next day, which “kept interrupting” her calls with clients.
“I texted my brother again and told them to stop or I’d call their parents … the last remnants of my youth dying in that moment,” she wrote. “I finally block enough that the calls stop, and my brother calls me and starts lecturing me about how I’m causing my nephew to be bullied and they’re just kids, and I can’t tell them what to do much less yell at them.”
She told her brother that she never yelled at the kids and that she was just “stern” when she demanded that they stop prank calling her.
“I tell him he could handle it or I would but he cannot tell me what I can and can’t do,” she added. “That’s when he lost it claiming he can.”
Soon after, the brother’s wife admitted that the boy “isn’t being bullied” and that he had only received a few verbal jabs from his friends.
“There’s community outrage because obviously it didn’t just impact me, but others as well,” she continued. “If I called some random adult as a kid 50 times in an hour and they yelled at me and called my mom I would have been grounded for a month. Much less impacting someone’s work?”
With her brother “super angry” and not speaking to her, the woman asked, “Am I the a—— for scolding kids who were harassing me via calls?”
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The majority of Redditors reassured her that she’s “NTA [not the a——].”
“If my kids were being extremely disrespectful like this, I’d darned sure want to know about it. Your brother’s response is unhinged,” one person replied. “I have a suspicion that your brother is a lawnmower parent … if anything gets in little Johnny’s way, he just runs it over and cuts it down.”
Another reader wrote, “Ask your brother if he would pay your bills and do your groceries if his kid and their friends had caused you to lose your job because they interrupted you at work events and at work.”
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