An adult daughter is wondering if she overreacted by taking house keys away from her mother, who keeps walking into her house unannounced.
The 36-year-old woman turned to Reddit’s “Am I the A——” forum to share how her mom routinely enters the home, sometimes beelining to her bedroom, even though she’s been told not to without advance notice.
“So this happened yesterday,” she wrote in her Jan. 28 post. “My mother just let herself into my house and walked into my bedroom at around 9:10 a.m. without a heads-up she was coming over, nor asking if she could come over, or even knocking at the damn patio door.”
The woman explained how her mom then surprised her inside her bedroom and asked why she wasn’t working from home yet. And after being told to leave, the mom “pottered around in my kitchen ‘cleaning’ stuff” and tried to do other house duties, the daughter recalled.
“She has essentially OCD [obsessive-compulsive disorder], and it drove me nuts when I was a child, but coming into my house to nitpick everything is just unacceptable,” she said. “I told her to leave multiple times, and after a good 5 minutes plus of that I told her to get the f— out ASAP, she did not take kindly to it but she never takes kindly to me establishing boundaries.”
Elaborating on how often this happens, the daughter revealed that it has occurred “around once every other month” for the past few years.
“My anxiety is off a cliff because of this and other personal stuff,” the daughter emphasized. “I know she wants to ‘help’ but I am going insane over the intrusiveness. … I just want to know if I am overreacting or underreacting because this has been my whole life.”
Seeking outside opinions on her decision, the woman asked Redditors, “[Am I the a——] for asking for my house keys back from my mother as she just lets herself in with no heads up and has walked into my bedroom too many times now while I am half asleep?”
The post attracted more than 350 comments within two days of her posing the question, with many people telling her she’s “NTA [not the a——].”
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“Underreacting. NTA,” one person assured her.
Another commenter chimed in with her personal experience dealing with a similar situation: ”I did the same thing with my dad who wouldn’t respect that I had my own place and my own life and thought he could barge in whenever he wanted,” the Redditor wrote.
In an update, the daughter said she told her mom that “she will get key privileges once I can trust her to respect boundaries.”
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