Hi, everyone. My name is Anastasia, and I’m 21 years old. It took me a lot of courage to write this post, but what happened today left me feeling like I had no other choice.
Everything started when I was just three years old and my parents divorced. My father was checking into a clinic for alcohol addiction treatment, so he couldn’t take me in. My mother, Ira (41), categorically refused to take responsibility for me. She has never worked a single day in her entire life, which eventually forced me to start working at 14 just to survive.
After the divorce, Ira started drinking heavily and gave my grandmother, Olga (her own mother), an ultimatum: either Grandma took custody of me, or Ira would send me to an orphanage. That’s how I ended up living with my grandmother.
Ira went off to pursue her love life. Every time another relationship fell apart, she would come back to live with us. Grandma was too compassionate to turn her away, but the drinking never stopped. From early childhood, I watched my drunk mother chase my grandmother around the house with a frying pan.
When I was five, Ira got married for the second time and moved out. She had my younger sister, Sasha, with that husband. Because Ira drank even during pregnancy, Sasha couldn’t even crawl when she was one year old.
The final straw came when Ira’s husband locked her and the baby inside their apartment without keys and went on a drinking binge that lasted several days. When my grandmother found out, she came over and physically took Sasha away to live with us.
Sasha still lives with us today, and she has serious psychological and physical consequences from what she experienced during early childhood.
At the time, Ira absolutely refused to leave her husband, although they eventually divorced anyway.
After yet another divorce, Ira moved to the capital to live with her third husband, Andriy. The two of them drank like there was no tomorrow and regularly called Grandma and me in the middle of the night to complain about how much they hated each other.
When I turned 15, they decided to move back to our city. Thankfully, they didn’t move into our apartment. My grandparents bought them a room in an old factory dormitory.
I should mention that my grandparents had been divorced for years by then. My grandfather had long since moved in with another woman. He would occasionally express concern about our situation, but in all those years, he never actually did anything to help us.
That’s when my personal hell truly began, because I was old enough to understand everything.
At one in the morning, Ira sent me a video of herself covered in bruises, claiming that Andriy was setting their apartment on fire. I panicked and rushed across the entire city.
When I arrived and was desperately trying to break down the door while crying, I discovered that it had all been another disgusting manipulation to get attention. They were both already asleep.
Six months later, something similar happened again. A neighbor found Ira lying in the street, completely wasted, with a head injury and no phone. She called my grandmother.
Knowing how dangerous the situation could be, I refused to let my elderly grandmother go there and went to deal with it myself.
Andriy had gone to visit his mother in Kyiv, so Ira was alone in the room.
That night, my drunk mother attacked me and tried to stab me with a knife. By some miracle, I managed to grab yet another puppy she had acquired and escape outside.
I didn’t contact the police because, in our country, law enforcement often ignores domestic violence and only shows up “when someone has already been killed.” I didn’t tell my grandmother either because I wanted to spare her the heartbreak.
Speaking of animals, Ira acquired new pets almost every week and then simply gave them away to other people. Whenever Grandma confronted her about this, Ira would say that animals were more important to her than her own children and that they replaced therapy for her.
To this day, I genuinely don’t understand what she thinks therapy has to do with any of this.
When I was 16, Ira and Andriy moved back to Kyiv, and things finally seemed to settle down.
I managed to attend college for a while and then return to high school. In Ukraine, it’s possible to attend college instead of the final years of high school and later return to the 10th grade.
Eventually, I started dating an amazing guy, and we still live together today.
From the time I turned 16 until 2025, when I was 20, I didn’t see Ira even once for four whole years. We weren’t in contact, although she still communicated with my grandmother.
When Russia launched its full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, Ira and Andriy stayed in Kyiv. I later learned that Ira had been deeply traumatized by the explosions, and I think that also seriously affected her mental health.
So why did I see her again in 2025?
Because Andriy, may he rest in peace, died.
She had nowhere to live in Kyiv. They had been living with Andriy’s mother, who has severe mental health issues, and immediately after the funeral, she kicked Ira out with all her belongings.
And that’s when my grandmother and I decided to play the role of charitable saviors again.
We brought Ira back to our city so she wouldn’t drink herself to death somewhere or end up dying under a fence.
We knew she would be severely depressed after Andriy’s death because they had been together for over ten years, but we had absolutely no idea how catastrophic things would become.
She arrived at our home by taxi straight from the train station, so drunk that she literally couldn’t stand on her own feet. She tried to grab my arms, was rambling incoherently, and started talking about my godmother’s deceased friend, screaming that she had seen her at a cemetery in Kyiv.
I called a psychiatric ambulance. The police arrived with them.
The officers were genuinely supportive on a human level, but legally, they couldn’t do anything because my mother signed a REFUSAL of hospitalization. Here, psychiatric hospitalization is voluntary unless specific legal conditions are met.
The medical staff and police told me directly, “When she actually comes at you with a knife, that’s when we’ll take her away by force.”
I started looking into court-ordered treatment, but it’s almost impossible to arrange in our country and costs an absurd amount of money.
A few days later, Ira sobered up, recovered somewhat, apologized to everyone, and announced that she was going to look for a job.
But why did she suddenly need a job so desperately after almost 40 years of unemployment?
Because, as it turned out, she had been secretly messaging a Brazilian man named Pedro for six months. I don’t even know how old he is.
And he had already proposed to her!
So she announced that she was going to fly to Brazil to be with him in two months.
In reality, those “two months” turned into an entire year of absolute hell for us.
I forgot to mention one extremely important detail: three years earlier, Ira had been diagnosed with multiple sclerosis.
She had undergone serious treatment, but when someone drinks as heavily as she does, the medication can become less effective or difficult to manage safely.
By the time she moved in with us in 2025, her condition was terrible. Her hands were shaking so violently that she couldn’t even light the stove by herself.
Three months after she moved into our apartment, we got into a serious physical fight because she was completely wasted again.
Her alcoholism had reached the point where she drank vodka like it was ordinary water.
Later, I discovered that she had secretly brought enormous supplies of alcohol from Kyiv because my grandmother was supervising her and wouldn’t let her go outside alone.
When her Kyiv stash ran out, Ira came up with another disgusting plan.
She told Grandma that she urgently needed to buy medication to take with her to Brazil because supposedly those medications weren’t available there or were extremely expensive.
They would go to the pharmacy together, and Ira would pick up her medication along with pure medical-grade alcohol.
Then, once they got home, she would secretly dilute the alcohol with water and drink it.
I genuinely don’t understand how she didn’t die from that.
Immediately after our fight, I gave my grandmother a strict ultimatum: either we called a psychiatric ambulance and found a way to get Ira admitted to a facility, or I was leaving home.
Grandma refused to call the doctors.
She was terrified that Ira would sign another refusal of hospitalization and then discover that we had tried to “send her to the psych ward.”
Grandma believed that Ira would completely lose her mind over it and deliberately refuse to leave for Brazil, choosing to stay with us forever out of spite.
So I packed a few essential belongings and left.
At first, some friends who lived nearby took me in. Then my boyfriend arrived and took me to his place.
This was June 2025.
I stopped communicating with my grandmother completely for a while, but I continued regularly contacting my younger sister, Sasha, because I wanted to provide her with at least some emotional support while she was still living through that nightmare.
In July 2025, my mental health deteriorated so severely that I had to see a psychiatrist.
Because of daily panic attacks and intrusive suicidal thoughts, I was diagnosed with clinical depression and generalized anxiety disorder.
Unfortunately, I’m still struggling with both conditions and haven’t fully recovered.
From the moment Ira arrived until May 2026, my poor grandmother was handling all her paperwork alone.
Getting Ira cleared to travel to Brazil required an absolutely insane amount of documents, certificates, and apostilles.
My grandmother had to reschedule appointments at the consulate or visa centers at least six times because Ira kept inventing ridiculous excuses to delay everything.
Another indication that Ira was simply stalling was the damn translator.
For some reason, instead of wanting a new phone (hers was completely smashed), she desperately wanted an AI-powered pocket translator, and it had to be a PARTICULAR brand.
That model had been discontinued a long time ago, but she kept feeding Grandma lies about having ordered one and claimed it would take a month to arrive. I found out about all of this rather late.
Eventually, I got involved and said I would order her a translator with exactly the same features from a different brand.
I finally ordered it and picked it up. It was extremely expensive, especially considering that I was already in debt, but I bought it anyway.
I sent it to her through my grandmother.
And she refused to accept it because it wasn’t the right one.
It had exactly the same specifications. Exactly.
Ira threw a theatrical tantrum, complete with rolling around on the floor and her favorite argument: “I’ve never had anything like this before. I have the right to treat myself.”
She started calling me to complain, and I told her that I would message Pedro and simply explain the situation to him.
Immediately afterward, she blocked me.
According to her, “I’m tired of spreading my legs for my boyfriend, so now I want to steal Pedro from her.”
Okay, then.
There were plenty more adventures surrounding her departure.
For example, she got drunk at the airport and missed her flight, costing me €800. But that’s a story for a separate update because this post is already getting ridiculously long.
Somehow, after all that, she finally made it to Brazil.
At first, she and Pedro entered their honeymoon phase. They had all kinds of erotic profile pictures, matching images featuring their supposed “AI baby,” and everything seemed fine.
Then, in June 2026, just three weeks after she arrived in Brazil, I received a message from Pedro on the night before my university graduation defense.
He told me he was sending her back and buying her a plane ticket.
I thought, “Wow! He promised to reimburse me for the €800 she cost me by missing her previous flight, and he still hasn’t paid me back, but now he wants to buy her another ticket home?”
However, about 20 minutes later, his messages suddenly stopped, and he disappeared.
Until today, October 28, everything had been relatively quiet.
I was still blocked by Ira. Their social media profiles still had matching profile pictures and statuses, as if everything was perfectly fine.
I could have simply tried to forget the whole thing like a terrible nightmare.
But apparently, in September 2026, she cut her wrists for the first time while in Brazil.
According to Pedro, they had an argument, and he told her he wanted to break up. She grabbed a knife and locked herself in a room.
For some reason, he decided to send me a photo of her supposedly lying unconscious, surrounded by blood.
Of course, I checked whether she had any visible bruises or signs of physical assault. Everything seemed fine in that regard.
Half an hour later, he sent me a video of her sitting on the couch with her legs crossed like royalty, her head tilted back, flipping him off.
He then called an ambulance and filed a police report against her. That’s what he told me, anyway. He claimed that filing a report was mandatory procedure in Brazil.
But the medical staff also told him they couldn’t hospitalize her without her personal consent.
And, of course, she refused.
They eventually reconciled.
I asked him several more times whether she had received any psychiatric treatment or been hospitalized, but I never got a clear answer.
After a while, everything seemed to return to normal again.
Until today.
I suddenly noticed her profile picture among my chats on a messaging app, along with a message from her:
“Just don’t tell Mom, Sasha, or Dad about this.”
Then she sent me two videos showing both her arms covered in blood, with cuts all over them.
Honestly, it looked like she was about to follow up with, “I’m nominating you for this challenge. Your turn!”
I never wanted to receive videos like that from my biological mother, but laughing has always been one of my trauma responses. So, at that moment, I was simply fucking stunned and completely frozen.
After the videos, she sent a message explaining that she was “smart enough to cut herself for dramatic effect without actually killing herself.”
Apparently, she just wanted me to see “how beautifully her blood flows.”
She also added that she wouldn’t cut herself deeply enough to die until she got a tattoo saying “Memento Mori,” because she wanted her “corpse to look beautiful.”
I immediately called Pedro, but he didn’t answer.
The only thing I could manage in that emotional state was to reply that she should check herself into a psychiatric hospital because they could actually help her there.
After that, she started sending me strange messages. Apparently, Pedro had been in prison at some point (I still have no idea what she was talking about, but that’s his business), and now his sister’s husband was threatening him.
I replied coldly again, saying that in that case, she really needed to seek treatment because at least in a hospital, she would be safe from all of that.
She called me an idiot and blocked me.
So… AITAH for responding so coldly and telling my mother to check herself into a psychiatric hospital?
P.S. I’m genuinely asking everyone in the comments not to judge my past actions or those of my poor grandmother. We spent years just trying to survive everything that was happening around us.
I understand that parts of this post might not be perfectly coherent because I’m writing while extremely emotional, and English isn’t my first language.
I’m happy to answer any questions in the comments.
Also, just in case anyone is worried about my safety, please don’t be. I’m not alone. My boyfriend is here with me and has been incredibly supportive. I’m not planning to hurt myself. I’m just in an incredible amount of emotional pain right now.