Teen says her mom left for “a week” right before Christmas — and months later she and her 22-year-old brother were still raising five younger siblings while their mother called it the best thing that ever happened to her

A 19-year-old woman on Reddit said her mother walked out just before Christmas, told her she would be gone for a week, and then never really came back. In the BORU thread, she explained that she suddenly found herself responsible for five younger siblings — a 16-year-old sister, a 13-year-old sister, a 12-year-old brother, a 9-year-old sister, and a 7-year-old sister — while living in their grandmother’s house, with almost no real adult help. By the time of the first BORU update, it had already been nine weeks, and she said her mother had only contacted her three times and made it clear she was not returning anytime soon.

The woman said the situation was chaotic from the start. She and the kids were still living with their nan, but according to the post, the grandmother was not actually helping parent the children and seemed more interested in being absent or critical than useful. Their older siblings had already moved out, and their father had disappeared years earlier after a pattern of abuse that older siblings had confirmed. The woman wrote that she was trying to survive day to day while also asking practical questions like whether social services needed to be involved and how she could legally care for the children if their mother kept refusing to come home.

Then things began to shift because her older brother stepped in. In the first update, she said her 22-year-old brother agreed to move back home and help, on the condition that their mother not be allowed back into the house. He was already no-contact with their mother, and the woman said she knew she needed him because doing it all alone was no longer sustainable. She also said they started building a proper routine for the younger kids — meal plans, bedtime, school structure, discipline, and basic expectations — because before that, “nothing had been getting done” and the house had fallen into total disorder.

The first weeks of that new structure were rough. She wrote that the children were all reacting differently. The 9-year-old told her she liked having rules, which made the effort feel worth it. The 12-year-old mostly called her a loser and demanded his skateboard back over and over. The 16-year-old was, in her words, “hell.” The 7-year-old was having three tantrums a day, refusing food, sleeping badly, and stressing her out the most. She said she lost her temper once with the 13-year-old after she was “being horrific,” which led to an emotional breakdown and then surprisingly better behavior afterward. In other words, it was not a clean inspirational turnaround. It was just a teenager trying to become a parent overnight and failing and adjusting in real time.

The mother, meanwhile, was not exactly remorseful. In one early comment preserved in the BORU post, the woman said her mother was cooperating with kinship arrangements but had also told a friend that leaving the children behind was “the best thing that’s ever happened to her.” That line seemed to shape a lot of the daughter’s anger from then on. She wrote that if her mother ever tried to come back, she would do everything she could to keep her away from the kids. By that point, it was not a matter of waiting for the parent to come to her senses. It was damage control.

A few weeks later, she updated again and said she and her brother had moved toward kinship care instead of straight guardianship because it made more financial sense for the family. That meant formal help and recognition were beginning to come through. Her second-oldest sister also started sending money, and another older sister said she would try to help when things were stable. The woman said she and her brother were slowly getting the younger kids into a better rhythm and that just having another reliable adult in the house had changed the tone of everything.

By April, the bigger picture of the trauma started showing more clearly. In the third update, the BORU post says the 7-year-old was taking everything the hardest and beginning to see the woman and her older brother as her “parents.” The brother, for his part, was trying to figure out discipline without repeating what had been done to them. The woman wrote that he still carried scars from being whipped with an electric cord by their father and was determined not to become that kind of adult with the younger kids. Around the same time, she was also trying to get all the siblings through medical appointments, improve their food and routines, and line up therapy for the family.

An especially painful update came in mid-April, when the woman said she confiscated her 16-year-old sister’s phone and discovered she had been secretly messaging their mother. The teenager had been begging their mum to come home, and the mother had reportedly answered that she had “better things to do than raising the children.” The woman said finding those messages wrecked her, because it showed how much hope the younger siblings were still carrying even while their mother had already emotionally abandoned them.

By late May, things were still hard, but no longer lawless. The woman said her older siblings were slowly reentering the picture in different ways. One older sister came for a visit and started reconnecting with the younger children for the first time in years. The family also began talking seriously about moving to a different city for a fresh start, with the brother’s remote job making that possible. At that point, the woman said finances were stabilizing enough that she and her brother could budget and even save some money, which was a major shift from the panic mode they had started in.

The emotional center of the story, though, stayed with the younger girls. In one update, the woman said the 7-year-old had started calling her “mummy,” something she had very mixed feelings about. She wrote that no one else was stepping into the mother role, so she was trying to get used to it, even though she was only 20 by then herself. The 9-year-old was also testing whether she could call her that, but felt awkward about it. The woman tried to reassure her that she could if she wanted to. At the same time, she worried about the youngest starting to call the older brother “dad,” because she knew that could trigger the other kids’ anger and grief around their absent father.

By the later updates, the woman sounded older than the age in her posts. She was writing about discipline plans, therapist advice, one-on-one time for specific siblings, trying to separate fighting children, and reducing her own work hours because the household load was too much. She admitted parenting felt like hell sometimes. But the tone had changed from “is this even legal?” to something much sadder and steadier: this is our life now, and we are trying to make it livable. What began as a mother saying she would be gone for a week turned into a year of her daughter and son becoming the primary caregivers for five younger siblings, while the actual adults who should have protected them either disappeared, undermined them, or stood at the edges watching.

Original Reddit post.