Out Of Love
A twenty-year-old walks into the kitchen early, and his grandmother is standing at the blender putting sugar in his smoothie. She has been doing it for weeks.
0:00 / 9:46
Three stories this morning, all posted in the last day and a half, and in every one of them the person causing the damage believes they are being kind. A grandmother with a blender. A grandfather with a birthday cake. A friend with a car that never broke.
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.
Out of love
A twenty-year-old university student writes that over the last eight months he went from ninety kilos down to seventy-two. He says he did it because he was depressed and wanted one visible thing in his life to change, and that it did not fix his mental health but he looks better. He is not trying to lose more now — he is eating at maintenance and going to the gym — and his family has decided he is too skinny and says so constantly. 1
The grandmother is a retired doctor who worked in an infectious disease ward at the local hospital, lives in a town that loves her, and has connections. First his food scale went missing. He bought another for seven dollars, and a few weeks later that one disappeared too; he found out she had been throwing them away. Then the smoothies. She makes them a couple of times a week for everyone, mostly out of fruit former patients bring her, and yesterday he walked into the kitchen early and caught her spooning sugar into his. She admitted she had been doing it for weeks, because he looked sick and needed calories. 1
She had been telling him the smoothies had no sugar in them, and everyone else in the house got the version without. He never tasted the difference because she told the family she used a sugar substitute that is not sugar, so sweet was what the drink was supposed to taste like. He yelled at her, told her he will never eat anything she makes again, and asked her to pay him back for the two scales — about fourteen dollars. She is furious, and the rest of the family says he was disrespectful to an elder, that she did it out of love, that she was worried. In his words: the classic Christian grandma love excuse. They want him to apologise. 1
It's okay, mama
A mother whose baby has just turned one describes her father-in-law as a character: he made a speech at her wedding without permission, and another at her baby shower. She mentions first that she has contamination OCD, managed with therapy and medication, and that she knows what readers are about to think of her. 2
When the baby was born, the family was asked not to kiss him. Inside twenty-four hours her father-in-law came into the room, held him, kissed him, and when she asked him not to, kissed him again on his way out — his defence being that it was just on his hat. The baby had not had his first bath, and she had not kissed him yet. 2
At the birthday, during the smash cake, he walked up to the baby and said "look, let's eat together", then put his finger into the cake, licked it, and put it back into the cake. She told him not to. He said "it's okay mama, it's okay"; she said it was not, and he got up and left the party for a long stretch. She asks whether he did it on purpose or whether some people are simply that clueless, and says she would like to have a real conversation with him about boundaries but does not know how to start one. 2
My transmission blew
Six months ago a college friend announced a bachelorette weekend in Scottsdale. The group chat filled with four-star villas, bottle service at a day club and matching linen sets, and the poster did the arithmetic: her share was going to be almost twenty-five hundred dollars. She had three hundred and forty dollars in her checking account and was skipping meals to make rent. Every other woman in that chat had wealthy parents or a tech job. 3
Three days before the flight she called the bride in hysterical, fake tears and said the transmission had blown on the highway, that towing and repairs would come to three thousand dollars and that she was wiped out. The bride told her not to worry and not even to think about the money. She spent the weekend in her apartment with the blinds shut, eating boxed macaroni and cheese, watching their Instagram stories. 3
Two days later, in the update, they met for coffee and the bride's first question was how much the mechanics had charged her for the transmission. In the poster's words, hearing her sound so worried about a fake repair job broke whatever was left of her ego, so she confessed: the car was fine, she had three hundred and forty dollars, and she had panicked out of poverty shame. The bride laughed. The trip had been a nightmare for everyone — bickering over splitting bills, and a bride who felt guilty all weekend behind the polished photographs and said she wished she had stayed home too. 3
Where all three land
Sugar in a smoothie, because you looked sick. A finger in a cake, because let's eat together. A blown transmission, because you would only have worried.
Each of these was a decision made about somebody and handed over as a kindness afterwards, and the quiet is the part that keeps the person making it safe. Nobody argues with a kindness. So the question worth carrying into the group chat is the one the episode ends on: what is the nicest thing anybody has ever done to you without asking, and how long did it take you to work out what it cost.
References
- 1
- 2
- 3
This story was produced automatically by a channel. One sentence is all it takes for Neodrop to keep producing for you.