Am I the asshole for going through my granddaughter’s babysitter’s phone while she was in the bathroom?
I (60F) watch my granddaughter Maisie (7F) three days a week while my daughter Brooke (34F) works. About four months ago, Brooke hired a part-time sitter named Courtney (24F) to cover the two days I can’t be there. I didn’t love the idea – I offered to rearrange my schedule – but Brooke said Maisie needed to “socialize with someone younger” and I let it go.
The first thing I noticed was small. Maisie stopped wanting to play with her dolls. She’d had this little plastic kitchen set she dragged everywhere and one day it was just in the corner. Untouched. I asked her about it and she shrugged and said, “Courtney says baby stuff is embarrassing.”
I told Brooke. Brooke said Courtney was just trying to help Maisie “grow up a little.” I dropped it.
Then Maisie started having accidents at night again. She’s been dry since she was four. I mentioned it to Brooke and Brooke said the pediatrician thought it was stress from second grade. Maybe. But something in my gut wouldn’t settle.
Two weeks ago I picked Maisie up early from Courtney’s apartment and Maisie ran to me so fast she nearly knocked me over. She buried her face in my neck and wouldn’t let go for a solid five minutes. Courtney stood in the doorway with this smile that didn’t reach her eyes and said, “She’s just tired, Linda. She was a little fussy today.”
Maisie wasn’t fussy. Maisie was shaking.
On the drive home I asked her what was wrong and she said, “Nothing, Grandma.” But then she said – so quiet I almost missed it – “Courtney gets mad when I tell.”
My stomach dropped.
I called Brooke that night. Brooke said I was “spiraling” and that Maisie tells stories and Courtney had “excellent references.” She asked me to please stop interrogating a seven-year-old.
So last Thursday, Courtney brought Maisie to my house for a handoff and left her phone on my kitchen counter while she used the bathroom. I know how that sounds. I KNOW. My friends are split down the middle on this – half say I had no right, half say I’d have been crazy not to.
I picked it up.
The screen was already unlocked. I went to her photos first because I didn’t know where else to start and I needed to be fast.
What I found in that camera roll –
What I Saw
Nothing.
That’s the thing that’s hard to explain to people when I tell them this story. There was nothing obviously terrible. No bruises. No pictures of Maisie crying. Nothing that would’ve made a detective slam a folder on a table.
What there was: Maisie looking uncomfortable. Over and over. A dozen photos, maybe more, taken when Maisie clearly didn’t know she was being photographed. Maisie eating at Courtney’s kitchen table with her shoulders up by her ears. Maisie sitting on the couch with her arms wrapped around her own knees, staring at the TV. Maisie with her eyes down. One where she was mid-cry, face blotchy, and Courtney had taken it anyway.
And a video.
I hit play. Sound off because I could hear the bathroom door still closed, water still running.
It was maybe forty seconds. Courtney’s voice, off-camera, saying something I couldn’t make out without the sound. And Maisie – my Maisie, who talks constantly, who narrates her own pretend-play like a sportscaster, who has never once in her seven years been at a loss for words – Maisie was sitting completely still with her hands in her lap and her eyes forward like she was waiting to be told what to do.
The water shut off.
I put the phone down exactly where I found it. Stepped back to the stove. Pretended to stir something that wasn’t on.
Courtney came back in, picked up her phone without looking at me, said “same time Monday?” and left.
I went to the bathroom myself after the door closed. Sat on the edge of the tub for a while.
What Brooke Said
I didn’t call Brooke this time. I drove to her house.
She was making dinner. I sat down at her kitchen table – the same table where Maisie does her homework, where we’ve had probably three hundred meals together – and I told her what I saw. All of it. The photos. The video. The look on Maisie’s face in every single one.
Brooke put down the spoon. She didn’t say I was spiraling.
She also didn’t say I was right.
What she said was, “Mom, you can’t go through someone’s private phone. That’s illegal, you know that.”
I told her I knew.
She said, “Maisie has never said anything to me. She talks to me.”
I said, “She told me Courtney gets mad when she tells.”
Brooke’s face did something. She turned back to the stove.
We ate dinner. The three of us. Maisie sat between us and ate half a grilled cheese and asked if she could be excused and went to watch TV in the other room. Brooke and I sat there with our plates and didn’t say anything for a while.
Then Brooke said, “I’ll talk to her.”
I drove home. I don’t know what I expected. That’s not true. I expected Brooke to react the way I would’ve reacted if someone had shown me those photos. Immediate. Certain. I expected her to be me.
But she’s not me. She’s thirty-four and she hired this girl and she’s been telling me for four months that I was overreacting. Admitting I was right about this means admitting something she doesn’t want to admit about her own judgment.
I understand that. I do. It doesn’t make it easier.
What Maisie Said
Brooke called me Sunday morning.
She’d talked to Maisie Saturday night, after I left. Bedtime, lights half-down, the way you do when you want a kid to tell you something real. Brooke said she asked open questions. She’d looked it up. She’d actually looked up how to talk to a child about this without planting anything, without leading her.
Maisie talked for forty-five minutes.
Not abuse. I want to be clear about what Brooke told me, because I’ve been precise about this with everyone I’ve told. Not what you might be fearing. But Courtney had been – the word Brooke kept using was cruel. Small cruelties, accumulated over four months. Maisie’s drawings were “babyish.” Maisie’s snack choices were “gross.” If Maisie cried about something, Courtney would tell her she was being dramatic and take a picture of her face to “show her how silly she looked.” That’s what the crying photo was. That’s what the video was, Brooke thought. Courtney showing Maisie herself.
She’d told Maisie not to tell because “grandmas make everything into a big deal.”
There it was.
Brooke cried on the phone. She said she was sorry. To me, not to Maisie yet, but I think she’d already said it to Maisie because Maisie was apparently asleep in Brooke’s bed when Brooke called me. She said, “I should have listened to you. I thought you were being overprotective because that’s what you do.”
I said, “I know.”
She said, “I’m so angry at myself.”
I said, “Don’t be angry at yourself right now. Deal with Courtney.”
What Happened After
Courtney was let go Monday morning. Brooke texted her. No explanation, just that she wouldn’t be needed anymore. I told Brooke she didn’t owe Courtney an explanation. Brooke agreed. She almost called her anyway. Old habit, wanting to be fair, wanting to be liked. She didn’t.
We talked about whether to report it. To who, exactly, is the question. There’s no crime that we can name, not specifically. What Courtney did is the kind of thing that’s real and documented and leaves marks that don’t show up on an x-ray. We talked to a counselor – Brooke found someone who works with kids, a woman named Dr. Hewitt, who Maisie has now seen twice. Dr. Hewitt says Maisie is going to be fine. She says kids are resilient in ways adults underestimate, especially when they have secure attachment figures around them.
She looked at me when she said that. I’m taking it.
Maisie got her plastic kitchen set back out last week. She’d shoved it under her bed at some point. She set it up in the living room and made me a full four-course meal: plastic eggs, plastic pancakes, a plastic turkey that she said was “roast beef, Grandma, obviously,” and a little plastic birthday cake that she sang to herself while she assembled it.
I ate every bite.
She’s been dry three nights running.
So Am I?
Am I the asshole?
Some people in my life say yes. My neighbor Gail, who is otherwise a reasonable woman, told me I violated Courtney’s privacy and that the whole thing could have gone very differently if Courtney had been the type to press charges. My sister-in-law told me I got lucky. My friend Donna, who has four grandkids, said she’d have done the same thing in thirty seconds flat and anyone who says otherwise has never loved a child.
I’ve thought about it a lot. More than I expected to, honestly, because I thought once I knew what I knew, the question would answer itself.
Here’s where I land: I don’t think I had the right. I think I did it anyway. Those two things can both be true and I’ve stopped trying to collapse them into one clean answer because there isn’t one.
What I had was a child who was shaking in my arms and whispering that she’d been told not to tell. What I had was a phone, unlocked, on my counter, for forty-five seconds. What I had was sixty years of knowing when something is wrong and being told, repeatedly, that I didn’t know what I was talking about.
I picked it up.
I’d pick it up again.
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If this one hit you somewhere, pass it along to someone who’d understand why she picked up the phone.
For more stories about complicated family dynamics, check out My Daughter Vanished for Six Years. Then She Showed Up at Her Father’s Funeral With a Letter. or My Four-Year-Old Said “The Quiet Room” and I Put a Recorder in Her Backpack for another story about a suspicious babysitter.
