Dear Prudence,
My sister is going into her hard-party post-divorce phase and thinks nothing of dumping her three kids on family and disappearing for hours on end. She will ignore her phone and is always late picking them up. One weekend our parents were out of town, so my sister decided to pull her disappearing act on me. The baby was sick so she begged me to watch them for the afternoon. I relented and warned her that I had to get up very early for a work trip. By 10 p.m. I was fed up and called my ex brother-in-law to come pick up the kids and told him I didn’t know where my sister was. All hell broke out after that. My sister is furious with me and told me that I want to ruin her life because her ex is going to use this against her. I told her to stuff it where the sun doesn’t shine. What kind of mom goes out and party when they have a sick kid at home? I wasn’t about to miss work and potentially lose my job because she wants to bar crawl and pick up randos.
Now my other sister and I refuse to babysit at all, which leaves our parents in the lurch for all the childcare. So they are very unhappy and pressuring me to relent and apologize because my sister is suffering stress as a single mom. I say this is what she signed up for, and if she is going to abuse the village, she loses the village. What do I do from here?
—No More