My evil mother-in-law said I should be more like her. It was her biggest mistake.
Recordings and Consequences
The church newsletter she’d edited for fifteen years started coming to me because I’d convinced them Carol wanted to retire. I used her own method of planting seeds of doubt about people’s competence. “She seems overwhelmed,” I’d say with Carol’s concerned face. “Maybe we should help by taking some responsibility off her plate”.
Soon, Carol had no responsibilities left. By Christmas, I’d absorbed every aspect of Carol’s social position using her own tactics against her. She screamed at Kenny to make me stop, but he just shrugged and said, “She’s exactly like you now, Mom”. “Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“This is not what I meant,” Carol sobbed. “She’s evil”. “No,” Kenny corrected. “She’s you”. “And you’re right”. “It is pretty evil”.
Carol stood there shaking with rage while her entire family nodded in agreement. “She’s ruined everything,” she whispered. I patted her hand using her own condescending gesture. “Oh, honey, I’m just getting started”. “Tomorrow, I’m implementing your idea about ranking family members at dinner based on their accomplishments this year”.
Carol went pale, but then something shifted in her expression. She smiled for the first time in months. A smile I recognized from when she’d successfully destroyed someone. “You’ve learned my methods perfectly,” she said quietly. “But you forgot that I’ve been doing this for forty years”.
My stomach sank, and she pulled out her phone and showed me a recording icon. “Every conversation, every admission of what you’ve been doing, all recorded”. My lawyer says, “Intentional infliction of emotional distress is very easy to prove when the defendant admits to deliberately destroying someone’s life”.
She tapped her phone screen with her perfectly manicured nail, and I watched the recording app save the file to her cloud storage right there in front of me. The little upload icon spun for a few seconds before showing a green check mark. She’d named the file with today’s date and my name.
Kenny’s face went completely white next to me as Carol scrolled through her recordings folder. There were at least twenty files in there, all dated from the past few weeks, all with my name on them. My chest got so tight I could barely breathe. She’d been planning this the whole time.
That evening, Kenny and I sat at our kitchen table with a notepad between us, trying to remember everything I’d said to Carol lately. He wasn’t mad at me, but I could see how worried he was. His mom had threatened lawsuits before, but always backed down. This time felt different. We both knew I’d given her exactly what she needed to actually follow through.
The list of things I’d admitted kept getting longer. I’d told her about calling relatives before her. I’d bragged about the prayer requests. I’d even laughed about her showing up to an empty house with all that food. Kenny rubbed his temples as we added each thing to the list.
After he went to bed, I stayed up searching legal websites on my laptop. The screen’s blue light hurt my eyes, but I couldn’t stop reading. Intentional infliction of emotional distress had four main parts. According to the legal sites, the person had to act really badly on purpose. Check. The behavior had to be extreme and outrageous. Check.
It had to cause severe emotional distress. Carol’s crying and shaking probably counted. The distress had to be something a reasonable person would suffer. My hands were shaking as I read about people who’d been sued for way less than what I’d done. Some cases had damages of over $100,000. We didn’t have that kind of money. Our savings would be wiped out. I finally closed the laptop at 3:00 in the morning, but couldn’t sleep.
Two days passed with me barely eating before Kenny’s coworker gave us a lawyer’s number. George Pollson’s office was in a strip mall next to a nail salon. He was older with gray hair and kind eyes, but his expression got more serious as I explained everything. He took notes on a yellow legal pad and asked me to repeat certain parts.
When I finished, he set down his pen and told us Carol definitely had a legitimate case. The recordings would be hard to fight. He said we might have some defenses since Carol had emotionally abused me first, but juries don’t always care about that. His retainer fee was $5,000 just to start. My stomach dropped, but we wrote the check.
That Friday, I had my first appointment with a therapist Kenny found through his insurance. Sabina Morales had a small office with plants everywhere and a white noise machine by the door. She listened to my whole story without interrupting. When I finished, she was quiet for a moment. Then she gently pointed out that I hadn’t just copied Carol’s tactics. “I’d become her”.
The words hit me like a punch to the gut. She was right. I’d turned into exactly what I hated. The revenge had felt so good, but I’d lost myself completely in the process.
Monday morning, I was making coffee when the doorbell rang. A courier handed me an envelope and had me sign for it. Inside was a formal letter from Dean Cochran, attorney at law. The letterhead was fancy with gold embossing. He was demanding a written apology to Carol, $50,000 in damages and public restoration of her reputation. The deadline was two weeks away.
My hands were shaking so bad I dropped the letter. Kenny took the day off work and we called George immediately. George spent two days drafting our response. He proposed mediation instead of going to court.
He rejected the $50,000 demand as excessive. He also warned that discovery would reveal Carol’s forty years of emotional abuse toward family members. He sent it Wednesday afternoon by certified mail. Having a plan made me feel slightly less panicked, but I still couldn’t eat much.
