Woman says going no-contact with her parents over her engagement was hard enough — then she says they escalated to lawsuits, threats at her husband’s job, trespassing, and hidden trackers on the car

A woman on Reddit said cutting off her parents after getting engaged was supposed to be the end of one painful chapter, but the fallout only grew more intense after she tried to pull away. In a thread later collected by r/BestofRedditorUpdates, she wrote that she had gone no-contact with her father over years of verbal abuse, physical abuse, threats toward her husband, and constant manipulation, while her mother kept enabling him and pressuring her to reconnect. In one of the later updates, she said extended family kept guilting her with lines about forgiveness, motherhood, and dead relatives supposedly being ashamed of her for keeping her distance.

The housing fight made the break messier too. She explained that she and her husband bought a house directly from the owner after her parents, who had been trying to buy it themselves, fell behind by about $60,000 and were at risk of foreclosure. She said that move helped everyone at the time, but that her parents later started telling people they had essentially bought the couple their first home. She also wrote that her father tried to use that story as leverage, insisting he was owed part of the equity and framing the house as something he had “supplied” for her and the baby.

In the January 2026 section of the BORU post, she said she briefly reopened contact with her mother after an aunt overdosed and pressure from relatives intensified. That meeting, in her telling, did not bring real closure. She wrote that her mother apologized in a shallow way, repeated how hurt she felt about not being told right away about the engagement or the baby, and kept crossing boundaries around gifts even after being asked not to. She said the emotional whiplash left her feeling torn between missing her mother and knowing that staying in touch mostly served to keep her father calmer and the wider family quieter.

Then the legal threats and intimidation ramped up. In the February 2026 update, she wrote that her mother trespassed at the house again and got into a screaming confrontation with her husband, and that her father later showed up at the husband’s workplace to threaten him again and ask him to “step outside and handle it.” She also said that about a week before the family moved out of state, they were served paperwork from her father’s lawyer claiming the parents were owed $300,000 in equity and asking to place a lien on the home. She wrote that her mother claimed not to know about the filing, then said she had convinced her father to drop the lawsuits as long as the couple did not “fuck with” either parent.

The part that pushed the story into truly unsettling territory came as the family was leaving. She wrote that after meeting her mother at a coffee shop, she noticed one of her father’s employees lingering by her car. The next day, while she and her husband were driving out of state with their baby, both got notifications that they were being followed by unknown devices. She said they checked the vehicle and found two off-brand AirTags magnetized to the tow hitch, while app data suggested there had originally been three devices tracking their movements since the day before. She said they immediately filed a police report and believed either her mother already knew or her father had arranged for the employee to place the trackers after learning about the meeting.

Even then, she admitted she had not fully cut the cord yet. In the update, she said she was still grey-rocking her mother because she feared that going fully no-contact again would trigger more retaliation, more family harassment, and possibly more legal attacks that she and her husband could not easily afford to fight. But she also told commenters she regretted reopening the door at all, said she felt “on eggshells” with her mother, and acknowledged that nothing in her life was better because of the contact. By the end of the BORU thread, the story no longer read like a family spat over an engagement. It read like a woman realizing that distance alone was not enough when the people she was running from still felt entitled to track, threaten, and financially corner her family on the way out.

Original Reddit post: https://www.reddit.com/r/BestofRedditorUpdates/comments/1rfxj1v/aitah_for_going_no_contact_with_my_parents_after/