What’s the most entitled thing you’ve ever seen someone do?

The Fight for the Boys

Then I started to think about my nephews. I wondered if I had made a mistake calling CPS. A huge part of me wished my sister had lost her passport overseas and never came home.

I had gotten so much closer to my nephews in the past couple days, and I realized that my heart was going to break when they had to leave. I didn’t want to say goodbye to them. I didn’t want to watch them walk back into my sister’s arms.

She was perpetuating the same thing my mom had done to me, and I realized I hated her more than anyone on this earth. I checked on my sleeping nephews, as I couldn’t sleep since my mind was racing, and I cried quietly in the hallway after closing the door to the guest room.

They were such innocent little boys, and they didn’t deserve any of this. The next day was a complete shit show.

I was awoken to the sound of somebody knocking on my door, although it sounded like somebody slapping a sandbag over and over on my front door. When I opened it, there was my sister next to a guy who had to be maybe 6’5″ and weighed almost 300 lb.

He was gigantic, and one of his hands was the size of my entire head. I can barely see my mom standing right behind him. Before I could even open my mouth to tell them to get the hell off my property, the man put his hand on my shoulder and shoved me down with all his might.

My sister and my mom and the stranger all made their way inside my house, and I was collapsed on my floor as soreness sank into my shoulder where the man had thrown me down. I immediately started screaming at my sister for bringing the stranger to my house and screaming at him not to touch me, but he seemed to speak only Russian.

I had no idea how this was even happening. Then I realized that my sister had beat CPS to my house.

They had been scheduled to come around 11:00 a.m. that day, but my sister had busted my door down at 8:00 a.m.. My nephews had been woken up by all the commotion and were walking out of the guest room with sleepy eyes.

At that point, I tried to get in between them and protect them from the stranger. But my sister barked at the man to go put my nephews in the car.

It was complete chaos. Once they realized what was happening, both my nephews started asking my sister to leave them with me.

I tried again to pull my oldest nephew out of the huge stranger’s arms. But this time he grabbed my head and threw it into the wall.

I saw stars as I sank to the floor and watched him carry my two little nephews out of my house. There was nothing I could do.

My mom was crying too, but she left with them as well. Before they all walked out of my house, my sister walked over to me as I held my head in my hands.

When I looked up at her, she spit at me square in the face. It was the most disgusting thing anyone’s ever done to me and one of the worst days of my life.

They all drove off in this giant black Suburban that I had never seen my sister in before. I had no idea who the man was and I couldn’t believe the trauma that my sister had just inflicted upon everyone.

She hadn’t even let them take any of their stuff. They had left without any of their clothes, neither of their Switches, and no breakfast. My heart broke for them, and I had an anxiety attack like I had never had before.

I didn’t realize how much it would hurt to care so much for my nephews, but I seriously love those boys with all my heart. I just wanted to protect them and make sure that they were cared for like I never had been when I was their age.

But now they were scared and shoeless in some random car with my psychotic sister and a humongous stranger. I was so disgusted with my mom’s behavior.

I couldn’t believe she had just stood by while she watched that huge man toss me around in my own home and pull my nephews out of their aunt’s house without a word. I couldn’t believe how evil my family had become. I couldn’t stop thinking about my nephews.

After I calmed down from my anxiety attack, I realized that I needed to snap into action and that time was of the essence and I was running out of it. When I finally came to my senses, I immediately called the police.

It turned out that they were already aware of the ongoing investigation because of Child Protective Services being involved and having an open case against my sister. I gave them all of the details of what had just transpired in my home only minutes before, and the officer on the line was actually incredibly helpful.

My voice was shaking, but I tried to stay steady and focused as I described the stranger. I racked my mind to try to remember the image of the license plate.

Luckily, because of how much responsibility I have in my job, I was used to picking up on and remembering little details that other people ignored. I somehow managed to remember every single number and letter on the Suburban’s license plate.

I gave the cops a description of the stranger, the full license plate, and a description of the outfits that my mom and sister were wearing. I really do think my sister was high on some sort of uppers when she came to my house that morning.

She looked absolutely feral and had this wild look in her eyes. I think she had been doing substances since she had landed overseas wherever she was vacationing with her sugar daddy.

My sister was crazy, but it was like something snapped in her, and I had never seen her act so truly unhinged and detached from reality. After I gave the cops every single little detail that I possibly could remember about my sister and the car they had driven away in, I hung up.

I did my best to take my mind off things, but I literally could not focus on anything else. I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t eat, I couldn’t nap, I couldn’t watch anything on TV.

I just kept seeing my little nephew’s faces in my head every time I closed my eyes and could not think about anything else except making sure that they were okay. I thought more about my mom and why she had always made excuse after excuse for my sister and how it had enabled my sister to grow up into becoming a truly evil person.

I even found myself thinking about my sister’s trip, wondering what kind of stuff she had done there if she really had a sugar daddy and how much he had paid her. I wondered if the money she had made on her trip had truly been worth it.

I even found myself thinking about what it would be like if it was just me and my nephews. I had the room for them, and now I definitely had the room for them in my heart as well.

The more I thought about it, the more I wanted that outcome: my sister out of the picture and just me and my nephews. I could give them everything that my sister couldn’t.

If my sister and I ended up in front of a judge in a custody battle over my nephews, the judge would be staring at one woman with an overseas sugar daddy and another with multiple degrees and a penthouse office. I tried to think positive things, but random dark anxieties about my nephew’s safety kept leaking into my mind.

I wondered if the giant man she had brought in my house was her sugar daddy. I wondered if he was with my nephews. I had just been laying on my couch staring at the ceiling overthinking, not realizing how much time had passed when I finally got a call back from the police station.

They had been searching for the Suburban my sister had left in for hours and finally found them. The officer who had called me back was the same one from earlier and continued to be very helpful and shared a lot of details with me.

He told me that they had three different police cars on the scene when they went to pull over the black SUV since they knew the man had already been violent that morning. Sure enough, even with firearms drawn on him, the man ran forward and tried to attack an officer and ended up getting hit in the thigh.

He had punched two officers in the head and given a female officer a black eye. My sister had also physically attacked the officer who had tried to put handcuffs on her initially.

I tried to picture it: my insane sister and the giant stranger physically battling a group of cops on the shoulder of the highway. I could not believe that something like this was actually happening in my family and I wasn’t just watching it on reality TV or something.

I was still reeling in shock from everything the officer had shared with me about my sister’s arrest when he began telling me that my sister actually wanted to speak to me. I couldn’t believe my ears, and he confirmed that my sister was sure that she wanted to use her one call on me.

I asked the officer if he thought she was going to ask me for bail money, and he was honest and said yes, that’s what she was screaming about. I told the officer that I wasn’t even going to take her call and that she could rot in there for all I cared.

The officer ended up giving me an understanding laugh, and I finally finished up the call without speaking to my sister. It was a complete mess.

Even though my sister was finally behind bars where she belonged, I found out my nephews were in CPS protection. Although they were safe, I was so worried.

I also only had a week until my Australia trip, and if I didn’t go, I would be losing thousands and thousands of dollars in bookings. Also, as I had mentioned earlier, if I canceled this trip, it would have looked extremely disrespectful to my boyfriend’s family before I even got a chance to meet them.

I had planned on marrying my boyfriend one day, and the last thing I wanted to do was give his family a bad first impression of me if I was going to be in their life forever. I called CPS to check on my nephews and just asked if I could speak with them, but they didn’t let me.

I tried to explain to them that I was family and some of the only mentally stable family they had, but they didn’t care. I was dealing with a different department than I had contacted before, and they were relentless. At that point, I was completely emotionally exhausted, and I had officially run out of options.

I spent the rest of the week trying my best to prepare for my trip while continuing to burst out in random tears as I remembered my nephews and thought about where they might be. I felt so bad because my boyfriend and I had been so excited for this trip for so long.

Now it was finally here, and I was completely distracted and full of anxiety. All of our conversations during the week leading up to my flight ended up being about how nervous and tense I was feeling.

Even though my boyfriend was incredibly kind and supportive as always, I was so angry at my sister for how she had treated her nephews and me. I couldn’t believe how disrupted my life had become because of my sister’s one choice to go visit her stupid sugar daddy.

I was so thankful that my job had been understanding. Just thinking about how my sister had been so quick to try and get me fired made me feel so betrayed and distrusting of anybody in my family.

Even my dad was off somewhere and not getting involved in all this drama when he surely was aware of all of it. He was spineless, just like my useless mom. My mom didn’t even care about her grandchildren.

She had enabled my sister’s idiot choices, and that had led to her grandchildren being in the custody of strangers. I was sitting at the bar at the airport on the day of my flight to Australia, two cocktails deep, when I started looking at some photos of my nephews that I had taken while they were staying with me.

We had taken these silly photo booth pictures at the mall all together, and I couldn’t help but begin crying all over again over how much I loved and missed them. I decided that that would be the last time I cried until I landed back in America.

I told myself that I really needed to try my best to enjoy the time with my boyfriend and his family. I had a life as well, and I couldn’t let my sister ruin my time even from all the way across the globe.

My time in Australia ended up going amazingly. I hadn’t seen my boyfriend in months, and when he ran to me in the airport and picked me up princess style, I felt my heart explode from happiness.

I had been through so much in those past couple of weeks, and just being back in the arms of my boyfriend who was so warm and caring to me made me feel so healed. He spent every moment of the trip catering to me.

Meeting his family went excellently, and I got along with both of his parents as soon as I was introduced. They turned out to be really fun, active people, and we did a lot of sightseeing together where they took me to their favorite nature hikes and views in their area.

At one point my boyfriend took me on a hike just the two of us to his favorite secret waterfall and we skinny-dipped together and just swam and laughed and kissed for hours. It was one of the most romantic days of my life, and I could not believe how perfectly the trip had gone, even though I was so worried before I left.

But of course, when I got home, the nightmare with my sister resumed. I decided to head to the local police station a couple days after I landed back in the US to officially press charges against not only my sister but my mom for breaking and entering into my home.

They had that man literally pick me up and toss me to the side so that they could barge into my house, and I was not letting that slide. When I went to go file the charge, I learned that the CPS investigation into my sister was ongoing and I was kind of frustrated to hear that they hadn’t found anything conclusive yet.

If they just spoke to my nephews, they would have understood what they had been through. On top of that, my sister had literally been arrested with a guy who had attacked multiple cops, and so I didn’t see how that didn’t prove that she was clearly an unfit parent for my nephews.

I left the police station that day content that the charges were filed against my family but incredibly frustrated to learn that the CPS investigation wasn’t resolved yet. I just kept worrying about my nephew’s safety and knew that them being with strangers couldn’t have been good for them, even if it was better than being with my sister.

I also could not stop thinking about how my sister had dragged them out of my house that morning without letting them grab any of their things. My youngest nephew had this little dog plushy that he brought literally everywhere.

I had been sleeping with it ever since my sister had taken my nephews away that day, and some mornings it made me want to cry just to wake up and see that little plush dog looking back at me. Like I said, my sister hadn’t even let them put their shoes on.

The poor little boys were probably so disoriented and felt so lost and abandoned, and I just wanted to make things right for them. But I felt like I had no power until CPS finally made a decision about a month after my sister’s arrest.

After calling CPS every single day and demanding updates on her case, they had finally come to a conclusion. They had made a decision to officially remove both my nephews from my sister’s custody and put them in protective care.

When the CPS agent first explained this to me, I was annoyed. I asked him to explain how that was any different than what had been going on.

They said that it now meant that my sister was not only being taken to court, but she would have to go to court if she wanted custody back of her kids ever again. I asked the CPS agent if it was likely she would win if she tried to get custody back.

The CPS agent told me that it depends if any other more fitting relatives would show up to court and ask for custody of my nephews. I knew immediately that that was what I was going to do, and I opened a separate court case in an effort to try to win custody of my nephews.

I didn’t care how long it took. I didn’t care how expensive the legal fees would be.

I opted to get the best lawyer that I could afford to work on my custody case since I knew it was one of the most difficult legal battles you could enter into. But before the custody case even started, the case I had against my sister for the breaking and entering into my home was the first one to begin.

I know some people might judge me for taking my own sister to court, but I literally would have fist fought her in a Wendy’s parking lot at that point. But I figured I should follow the law if I ever wanted custody of my nephews.

At the end of the day, that was my only goal in all of this. I just wanted my sister out of the way and my nephews back at home with me.

On the first day of our trial, I saw my sister in court, and it was the first time we had seen each other since the day she had broken into my house and let the man attack me. The very last interaction her and I had had was me looking up at her and her spitting a huge glob of spit directly into my face, so it was fair to say that neither of us were excited to see the other.

Well, the trial began, and eventually the judge mentioned that I had opened a custody case against her for full custody of my nephews. I guess my sister’s public defender hadn’t informed her before then, and she was finding out for the first time in the courtroom that day.

Well, my sister has never been one to react well to bad news. After the judge let the news slip about my custody charges against her, my sister completely snapped.

Despite us being in the middle of a courtroom, my sister slowly angled her body towards me, screamed my name, and then pounced on me like some sort of crazed hyena. She was clawing and scratching on my face and trying to rip out chunks of my hair.

It didn’t take long for the bailiff to come over and pull her off of me. But she managed to bite down extremely hard on my forearm right before he got to her.

It was one of the worst pains I had ever felt in my life, and the bite looked nasty and ended up getting infected. All this happened right in front of the judge, and once everything had calmed down, I knew my sister had just sealed her entire fate.

It took months and months, almost two years actually, for all of the criminal charges against my sister to pass and for her to finally get locked up for good. She was serving a life sentence thanks to all of her crimes stacked up on top of each other, and there was no way she was seeing the light of day anytime soon since her chances for appeal were so poor.

I never dropped the breaking and entering charges against my mom. The only way my mom managed to stay out of prison was by testifying against my sister in court and throwing her under the bus.

I don’t think I’ve ever felt such sweet satisfaction as watching my mom blame my sister for everything that had happened while sobbing her usual crocodile tears. I could not believe that my mom was finally betraying her perfect golden child, even though it had taken a lifetime as well as the government’s help.

I knew that day looking up at my mom on the stand that it was the last time I was ever going to see her. It was the last time I ever wanted to see her.

I had seen enough of her and my sister for a lifetime, and I was done with their constant toxicity. My sister had completely transformed my life into a never-ending legal battle, and I just wanted to have a normal day-to-day life again.

The custody battle for my nephews dragged on. Their birth father and his family began fighting me in court for full custody against them, and it just dragged the case out further.

I didn’t care. There wasn’t a force on Earth that could keep me from my nephews now that my sister was locked up.

It took almost two years of legal battles, but eventually I won full custody over my boys and brought my nephews back home. I will never forget how big they smiled and how tight they hugged me when they came home and found the bedrooms I had decorated for them in my house.

I walked into my youngest nephew’s bedroom and he ran to me to show me his rediscovered Switch. I surprised him with his little plush doggy and caught him in a tight hug when he fell into my arms.

The next thing I knew, my eldest nephew joined us, and both boys cried into my hair and told me how much they missed me. My eldest boy looked up at me, smiled with his big eyes full of tears, and just said, “I knew it, auntie, I just knew you would come back for us one day”.