For three months, I felt invisible in my own house. My adult stepdaughter, Kayla, moved in “temporarily” and treated me like her maid—leaving messes everywhere and never lifting a finger. My husband, Tom, kept telling me to give her time. But time turned into chaos. The final straw? One Sunday, after I’d cleaned the whole house, I returned from the garden to find takeout trash and orange Cheeto dust ground into my rug. Kayla didn’t apologize—she asked for pancakes.
That night, I decided: if she saw me as the maid, the maid was quitting. I stopped cleaning up after her. The house quickly reflected her mess. Then, I started collecting her trash, bagging it neatly, and returning it to her room.