So here is how this “Am I the A**hole?” post goes, and it makes for interesting reading. The situation is rather an unusual one too.
A mother of two reached out to social media users on Reddit a few months ago to ask if she would be wrong to stop her children from visiting their father on weekends because his girlfriend is “nasty” – in other words, dirty.
She explains that she and her ex went through a “messy break-up” about two years prior, but that after a couple of months “we both put our heads on straight and co-parented wonderfully for the first year”.
Then he got a girlfriend. Say no more. (Boy, do we know how this kind of drama goes down in most broken relationships.) However, the woman says she is engaged and happy, and that she and her new partner are enjoying their first house together. Sweet.
“I don’t care that he has a girlfriend. I just wish he hadn't picked this one,” she says.
In the first year her ex and the so-called “nasty girlfriend” were together, the mom claims she gave her children lice. Twice. Gasp! The situation was so dire that the woman “made him miss two of his weekends in a row until he swore to me he had gotten rid of the lice in his house”.
“And I threatened to make him take me to court to see his kids again if they came home with lice a third time.”
Then it got worse. A couple of weeks prior to her post, it was not lice that her children brought home, but a cockroach.
“I saw a roach in the kitchen. I, of course, flipped my sh*t, deep cleaned, and sprayed every inch of my house, threw out old boxes and clutter, and went very overboard. I dealt with roaches once in an old rented house and I refuse to go down that road again.”
The mother says she did not think much of it after that until her eldest child “excitedly” told her that they had spent the night at their dad’s girlfriend’s house over the weekend. And yes, you guessed it, the cockroach made his or her appearance a day or two after the children returned home.
For background, there is a difference between male and female roaches, according to cockroachzone.com. Females are usually larger than males (wider bodies) and have longer antennae. Their wings may not be functional and will lie dormant on their back. Males have long and broad wings, matched by their slender bodies. Just in case you were wondering
Anyway, back to the story. The mother then called the dad and asked about the bug she had seen.
“He picks them up from school on Fridays and drops them off on Sundays, so I'm assuming they came in the kids’ bags.”
Unless the roach was male, it certainly did not fly into their home, one would safely guess from the explanation above.
Unfortunately for the dad, he admitted that his girlfriend’s house has cockroaches, but he says they spray for them regularly. This got the mom “a little heated”, and the father ended up agreeing that the children would no longer spend the night over there anymore.
So, she let it go. Thank goodness. But this grace did not last long.
“Well the kids spent this last weekend at their dad's, and lo and behold, I just saw another roach in my house, after not seeing another one since the first incident.”
Now, the mother says she does not want to send her children to see their father anymore.
“They don't deserve to live with bugs because their dad is associating with nasty people. But I can't just take their dad away from them. Would I be the A**hole?”
Redditors did not seem to think that she would be in the wrong if she did this. What do you, as South Africans, think?
IOL BUSINESS