Please Clap
A mother leaves four kids in a house and drives three hours to a man. Five years later he throws her things out, and she calls home to ask for her room back.
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Three stories this morning, all surfaced in the last day, and in every one of them somebody has staged a scene for one other person. A mother who wants her old room back. A father with a second phone. A boyfriend who keeps rehearsing his own death. What each of them is waiting for is applause.
These are anonymous posters' accounts, paraphrased so nobody can be identified. A Reddit post is one person's version of events, not proof of every claim in it, and a comment section is a crowd of readers reacting, not a verdict. Where a poster reports what somebody else said or did, this piece repeats it as the poster's account, and no outcome has been added where the source does not provide one.
The homecoming
A twenty-year-old wrote in April that her mother, forty-one, was asking for her room back in the family house, after the man she left for threw her things out. The mother left in November 2020, after her husband caught her texting another man. She moved three or four hours away to be with him, and four children stayed in the house, the eldest of them eighteen. 1
According to the poster, her mother's goodbye was two sentences: that there was more than enough of the children to rely on each other, and that they would understand when they were older and had children of their own. In the years after, the poster writes, her mother came back for a day or two at a time, usually to collect clothes or after a fight with the man, and looked after his children while her own were left to manage. The room she now wants belongs to the youngest, who likes her space. 1
The house is not straightforward, and the poster does not pretend otherwise. Her older sibling, now twenty-four, went to court for custody of the younger children and for the tenancy, having told their mother that everything she had done would otherwise be said out loud in a courtroom. She handed both over and described herself as an unfit parent. The poster calls that blackmail and says it was not right, and also that it worked. 1
What followed, on the poster's account: a message saying they would talk in person, see you soon, love you; changed locks; the mother arriving at three in the afternoon rather than the five o'clock she had named, while an uncle was the only adult at home. She is described as insulting that uncle and slapping him, and later insulting the older sibling over being nonbinary, with the younger children in the car. The police came, the custody and tenancy paperwork came out of the house, and she was told to leave and not to come back. She apologised there, to the officers, and the uncle declined to press charges. The post was written in April and collected in r/BestofRedditorUpdates on 29 October, where it carried 242 upvotes and 57 comments when read. 1
Two phones
A twenty-one-year-old who moved back home and commutes to college was housesitting while her parents, fifty-five and sixty-five, were away on a road trip. Needing a password for the cable company, she went into her father's office, where he keeps a notebook of his logins, and found a box in a laundry basket with two budget Android phones underneath it. One of them had no password on it. The camera roll held four photographs, two of women's chests. The Reddit app was open on a swingers forum, the maps app had directions to a spa, and the phone ran on a different network from every other phone in the family. 2
She turned it off and left it alone that night. The next evening she told her boyfriend what she had found, and by the end of that conversation she had gone back up and read both phones. On her account they held a dating app, a Reddit account posting in local hookup forums, messages she read as appointments being arranged, and logins for a dating service that advertises discretion. 2
Nothing in the post describes a confrontation, and no claim in it is confirmed by anyone else. What the poster describes is a decision she has not made. Her mother is sixty-five and has been at home for as long as the poster can remember, and the poster's brothers have moved out and live far away. She writes that her mother deserves to know, and that she was awful for looking, and ends by joking that the lesson is not to be nosy. When read, the post had 31 upvotes and 36 comments. 2
The cough
A twenty-two-year-old, two years into a relationship with a twenty-six-year-old, writes that he has faked choking around five times to see whether she cared. She says it is always obvious he is faking, so she has laughed it off. Then he did it again, and she did nothing at all, and it turned into a full argument. His position, as she reports it, is that a real choking would have ended with her watching him die, and that he will not believe otherwise now. She compares the behaviour to a child who pretends to drown to see whether anyone dives in. 3
She adds the line that stays with you: even if she had played along, she would have been faking it too, so what would have been the point. The post had 99 upvotes and 124 comments when read, with no verdict flair attached at that point. 3
One question for your group chat
A mother who handed over a house and wants the receipt read aloud. A retired man with a notebook of passwords and a phone on the wrong network. A boyfriend who keeps dying for an audience of one.
Each of them built a version of themselves and performed it, and in each story the audience was the person who has to live with the result. A performance is usually not a lie. It is a true thing aimed at somebody who is not allowed to say no.
One question for your group chat, then. Who in your life is on stage right now, waiting to hear you clap? And what happens, do you think, when you put your hands in your lap?
References
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