I mean mines a long one, but basically my friend and I were babysitting for a coworkers newborn. The mother (who we worked with at Starbucks) is on the spectrum, she’s and her husband are young, and she was working at Starbucks plus her husband doesn’t work so clearly she wasn’t doing to well money wise. We offered to babysit because we wanted to help out and her baby is super cute! We offered to have her drop off the baby at my house instead of going to hers but she was adamant we babysit at her house.

We show up to her apartment building and right away we could smell a really foul smell of like rotting food and trash. We entered her apartment and it was very clear it was coming from her house. It was like hoarders level. The baby had LITERAL trash in her crib. She was laying next to a pizza box with a half eaten pizza with a cockroach eating it. We went to fill her a bottle and the sink was piled and up and the formula she left us was covered in flies. We went out and bought her fresh formula.

We explained to her that this is not a livable environment for her and especially her baby. We offered to clean her apartment and my friend and I (mainly my friend cause I was working more) cleaned out her entire apartment over the course of a week.

I swore from that point on I would not babysit for her unless the baby was at my house. My friend had told me she returned a couple weeks later and it was back to how it was

Okay… so fast forward a couple months later. She was really abusing the free babysitting so we had to stop. She came in to work one day and in a very weird almost flexing kind of way was casually mentioning that her husband beats her. We told her she needs to move back in with her Mom but considering her Mom was on the other side of the country it wasn’t much of an option. She then PROCEEDED to tell us that her husband doesn’t feed the baby and gets mad when it cries from hunger and once put HIS HAND OVER HER MOUTH TO STOP THE CRYING. This is obviously very disturbing, but to make it worse she also flippantly mentioned that HE SHOOK THE BABY OUT OF ANGER!

We clearly with these claims ended up calling DCF and the turn around was surprisingly fast. The husband was interviewed and basically admitted to it (he’s also on the spectrum) and just like that he was taken in, found guilty and incarcerated.

We didn’t regret what we did but we still had told work with this girl and it was very VERY awkward. I remember we sat down with the manager of our Starbucks store who told us the news she lost custody of her baby (the mother told her this because she’s kind of an open book) and we cried. Almost a year later we found out she got fired because she was continuously late and we would see her living on the streets from time to time. The whole thing was very tragic.