One stressed mama wrote to the AITA community on Reddit to ask if she did something wrong after her babysitter quit after revealing she had been reading private messages between her and her husband.
“I have a babysitter who watches my two young girls while me and my husband go to work,” the mom started her post. “She brings her daughter with her. She’s always been great.”
But then something awkward happened.
“One day, she was about 10 minutes late which made me late for work,” the mom shared. That being said, she understood how things happen and didn’t make a big fuss over it. “It’s fine because it hasn’t happened before, and she apologized, and I thought we were all good.”
But it wasn’t quite all good — as something happened the very next day.
“A day later, she lets me know that she had been helping my daughter on her iPad and some texts popped up between me and my husband,” OP wrote.
And in the text, the mom was complaining about being late due to the sitter being late.
“Well, she kept reading and read all our texts for the past month. I had also complained to him once that our babysitter had eaten all our Oreos. It was just funny banter, and I got over it quickly but I was still whining,” she went on.
“I would have never said anything to her about it.” The mom then wrote how the babysitter sent her a text the night before she was going to watch her kids. The text said the babysitter “was quitting because of those texts…she was really hurt I would complain about her to him. I feel horrible but also violated that she read all our texts,” OP revealed.
The mom was shocked by the situation — both that her texts were read and that the babysitter quit.
“I apologized for what I said but I still feel sad about it all,” OP then asked to the Reddit community if she was wrong in this situation.
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One person insisted on how they were definitely not the one in the wrong.
“You have the right to vent in private to your husband. You forgave her, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t affect your day. She violated your privacy. AND she had to go back a month before finding anything else about her. If you text with any frequency, that’s a lot of personal texts for her to have gone though. Any hurt she feels is her own fault.”
The person then added: “I would have fired her for reading through the texts. Seeing the one that popped up is one thing. Looking back through is another altogether.”
“NTA,” a second person agreed. “Reading texts that pop up is one thing, but the next step is to immediately tell the parents that those texts are popping up and the next step is to NOT VIOLATE SOMEONE’S PRIVACY BY READING TEXTS GOING BACK AN ENTIRE MONTH. Babysitter was unprofessional by doing that and you’re better off securing your electronics and hiring someone else.”
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