Imagine living with your boyfriend, but his mom stays over a lot. If his mom started cleaning when you weren’t home or while you were sleeping, would that bother you, or would you be grateful for the help?

In this story, one woman is in this situation, and she wishes her boyfriend’s mom would stop cleaning. She sees it as a violation of her privacy, but her boyfriend’s mom thinks she should be grateful.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for snapping at my boyfriend’s mom for cleaning our entire apartment while we were asleep?

Me (21F) and my bf (21M) have been living together for 5 months.

He wanted to live in a studio, but his mom is paying his rent and she wanted him to be in a one bedroom so she could come visit and stay for our college football game weekends.

I pay half the rent.

Her boyfriend’s mom was probably just trying to be helpful, but she didn’t take it that way.

My bf was away on internship on our move in day, and I ended up moving both of us in, with help from his mom.

After we moved all the boxes in, I had to leave for a few days, and I told her to not unpack anything. I like unpacking, and I didn’t want her going through my things.

When I came back, every. single. box. was unpacked and organized, including my clothes, my razors etc. Also, a lot of furniture and decorations that I had vetoed were set up.

I saw this as a huge violation, but kinda just took a deep breath and blew it off.

She has tried to establish boundaries.

My bf has said that she has a poor understanding of personal space, and has always been too involved in his life, which he has learned to live with.(He is an only child… I grew up with 10 siblings. Lol)

She has come to visit a few times and has cleaned our apartment almost every time she comes.

I have told her several times that there is no need, and even had to put a very hard boundary on her not washing our sheets or touching my clothes, since that feels like a massive breach of my privacy.

My bf doesnt understand why I’m upset but has been on my side.

His mom was at it again.

Last weekend she visited, we set the couch for her and we hung out after the game.

The next morning, we woke up to her cleaning our place. She had been cleaning for 2 hours while we were asleep.

I was pretty upset and my bf went to go talk to her. He said that she moves all of our things around and we can never find anything when shes done.

She completely brushed this off by saying “oh its okay, I’ll put everything back how I found it, its really gross in here”

But to OP, it was NOT okay.

I was in the bathroom, and as she was saying that I noticed that all of our towels, bath mats, and my personal perfumes and makeup were reorganized.

I got upset, and came out and told her that it really bothers me when she cleans our space, and that it makes me feel like a place that I am paying for doesn’t belong to me because someone else is treating it like their own. I said I really appreciated the effort, but that it makes me very uncomfortable.

She stopped cleaning, and changed the subject and I thought everything was fine.

My bf went to work, and she left a few hours later.

But everything wasn’t fine.

When I talked to him later he told me that she had called him and said that I deeply hurt her feelings, that she was trying to help, that i was being disrespectful and ungrateful, and that we should act as good hosts and keep the apartment cleaner for her when she visits.

I recently got diagnosed with endometriosis and haven’t been able to clean as much, but we still clean daily.

The biggest caveat here is that she has metastatic chest cancer and we don’t know how much longer she has left with us.

I said we can clean the apt together, but she didn’t like that. AITA?

Obviously, they don’t want to cut the mom off. She clearly means well, but she needs to respect their boundaries. Although, since she’s paying her son’s rent, she may think of the apartment as her apartment, which is a problem.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

This person has a theory about why the boyfriend’s mother is cleaning so much.

Another person thinks cancer isn’t an excuse to ignore boundaries.

This person had a similar mother-in-law.

Here’s a warning about his relationship.

This relationship may not work out.

If you liked that story, check out this post about a group of employees who got together and why working from home was a good financial decision.