Am I the asshole for going through my babysitter’s phone while she was in my bathroom?

I (27F) am raising my four-year-old son, Denny, completely alone. His dad’s been out of the picture since before Denny could walk, which means every decision – daycare, doctors, who gets to be around my kid – falls on me. I work two jobs to keep us in a one-bedroom apartment and I’ve been using the same babysitter, Tricia (24F), for almost eight months. My mom loved her. My coworkers said I was lucky to have someone so reliable.

Three weeks ago, Denny started wetting the bed again. He’s been fully trained since he was three. I figured stress, a new preschool year, whatever. Then he stopped wanting to eat dinner. Then last Tuesday he screamed and grabbed my leg when I tried to drop him off and said, “Please don’t make me go.”

He has never said that. Not once in eight months.

I told myself he was just tired. I dropped him off anyway. I went to work. I thought about it for six hours straight.

That night I asked him what was wrong and he wouldn’t tell me. He just kept saying “nothing” in this voice that didn’t sound like him. I asked if Tricia ever made him feel bad and he looked at the floor and said, “She gets really mad sometimes.”

I texted Tricia. She said everything was fine, he’d been “a little fussy,” completely normal kid stuff.

I didn’t believe her.

The next time she came over, I told her I forgot something in my room and I’d be right back. Her phone was on the kitchen counter. I picked it up. She hadn’t locked it.

I went to her messages. I don’t know what I was looking for. I scrolled through her texts with someone named Bryce – and when I got to the messages from last Thursday, the day Denny cried at drop-off, my hands started shaking.

She was texting him THE ENTIRE TIME she was supposed to be watching my son. Not a few messages. Hundreds. For hours. And then I saw the photos she sent him.

What Was in the Photos

Not what you might think. But maybe worse, in its own way.

The photos were of my apartment.

My kitchen. My living room. My bathroom cabinet, open, with all my stuff inside. The little shelf above the toilet where I keep my prescriptions. My bedroom doorway. She’d taken maybe fifteen, twenty pictures of my home and sent them to Bryce with captions. The captions were the part that made my stomach drop.

“lol she has literally nothing”

“this whole place is like one room, feel bad for the kid”

“her medicine cabinet is SAD”

There was one of Denny. He was sitting on the couch watching TV, and she’d taken it from across the room without him knowing, and the caption said “babysitting a four year old on a Friday night kill me.”

I stood in my hallway reading these messages and I could hear her in my bathroom, the water running, completely unbothered.

I put the phone back on the counter.

I walked to my room. I sat on the edge of my bed. I didn’t cry. I just sat there and counted the flowers on my comforter until I could make my face do something neutral.

Eight Months

Eight months I let this woman into my home.

Eight months of handing Denny over at the door, kissing his forehead, telling him I’d be back soon, trusting that someone was watching him. Not just watching. Paying attention. Actually being present with a four-year-old who needs presence.

Eight months of my mom saying, “She seems so sweet.” Of my coworker Janet saying, “God, you got lucky, good babysitters are impossible to find.” Of me feeling, for maybe the first time since Denny’s dad left, like one piece of my life was actually handled.

I’d given Tricia a Christmas bonus. Forty dollars, which was a lot for me. She’d texted back a string of heart emojis.

I wondered, sitting on that bed, how many times she’d photographed my apartment. How many times she’d texted Bryce while Denny sat ten feet away, invisible to her. Whether “she gets really mad sometimes” meant she’d snapped at him. Yelled. Whether Denny had tried to get her attention and gotten nothing back. Whether he’d learned, over eight months, that the woman in charge of him didn’t really see him.

He was four. He couldn’t have told me any of that. He just started wetting the bed.

When She Came Out of the Bathroom

She was completely normal. That’s what I keep coming back to.

She came out drying her hands on her jeans and said, “Okay, so I was thinking we could do pasta tonight, Denny loves the shells,” and I said, “Sure, sounds good,” and I grabbed my bag and I left.

I drove to work. I worked a full shift. I came home at 11 and Tricia said he’d gone down easy and I paid her and she left.

I didn’t say anything. Not that night.

I needed to think. I needed to figure out what I actually had and what it meant and what I was going to do about it, because I am one person doing the job of several people and I could not afford to blow this up and have nothing.

But I also couldn’t stop seeing that photo of Denny on the couch. That caption.

“babysitting a four year old on a Friday night kill me.”

He was just sitting there. Watching his show. Probably hoping she’d come sit with him.

What I Did Next

I called out of my Saturday shift. First time in four months.

I spent the morning with Denny. We made pancakes, the kind with the blueberries he picks out and eats separately before touching the pancake. I asked him, casual as I could make it, what his favorite thing to do with Tricia was.

He thought about it for a long time. Long enough that I had to keep my face still.

“Watch TV,” he said.

“Yeah? What does Tricia do while you watch TV?”

“Her phone.”

“The whole time?”

He nodded. Then he picked up a blueberry and said, “She doesn’t really play.”

I asked if she ever got mad at him and he got a little smaller in his chair. Not dramatically. Just. Smaller.

“Sometimes I ask her something and she goes ‘Denny, I’m busy, just watch your show.’”

That was it. That was the whole thing. She hadn’t hurt him. She hadn’t done anything that would show up on any official report. She’d just spent eight months being completely absent while physically present, and she’d gotten impatient when a four-year-old interrupted her texts to Bryce, and at some point Denny had figured out that asking for things got him a sharp voice, so he stopped asking.

He learned to be smaller so she wouldn’t get mad.

He’s four.

The Conversation

I texted Tricia that afternoon and asked if she could come by, no babysitting, I just needed to talk.

She showed up in a good mood. Didn’t seem worried at all.

I told her I wasn’t going to need her anymore. I said I’d found other arrangements and I’d give her two weeks’ pay to make the transition easier, which I absolutely could not afford, but I said it anyway.

She asked why.

I told her I’d seen her messages.

The color in her face changed. Not guilt, exactly. More like calculation, watching me, figuring out what I knew.

She said, “Those were private.”

I said, “You took pictures of my home and sent them to someone. Pictures of my kid.”

She said she was just venting. She said everyone vents to their friends. She said I had no right to go through her phone.

And here’s the thing. She’s not entirely wrong about that last part. I know that. I went through her phone without asking. I picked it up off my counter and I scrolled through her messages and I did not ask permission. That’s why I’m even asking the question in the first place, why I’ve been sitting with this uncomfortable thing in my chest ever since.

But she was in my home. With my son. And my son was getting smaller.

I gave her the two weeks’ pay in cash. She left without saying anything else. She didn’t apologize. Not for the photos, not for the captions, not for eight months of Denny sitting on that couch trying not to bother her.

Where We Are Now

My mom is watching Denny three days a week. My coworker Janet’s daughter, who is seventeen and actually likes little kids, is covering the other days for less than I was paying Tricia. It’s not a perfect system. It’s a lot of coordination and it means I owe my mom more than I can currently repay.

But last week Denny asked Janet’s daughter, whose name is Bri, if she wanted to play trucks. And she said yes. And I came home to the two of them on the floor with every truck he owns spread across the living room, and Denny was laughing at something, and he didn’t look small.

He hasn’t wet the bed in twelve days.

I still think about whether I was the asshole for picking up that phone. I don’t have a clean answer. Privacy is real. What I did wasn’t nothing.

But Denny looked at the floor when I asked if Tricia made him feel bad. He said “she gets really mad sometimes” in a voice that didn’t sound like him. He’d learned to ask for less.

I needed to know why. I found out why.

I’d do it again.

—

If this one got to you, pass it along to someone who needed to read it today.

For more tales of unexpected discoveries, check out My Husband Left His Laptop Open and I Saw Something I Can’t Unsee, or perhaps My Seven-Year-Old Drew Our Family Portrait and There’s a Man in It I’ve Never Met for another story about kids revealing secrets.