10/22/2025
"My 16-year-old daughter saved for months to buy her dream sewing machine. When she didn’t do her chores fast enough, her stepmother tossed it into the pool — and my ex-husband just watched. They thought I’d lose my temper. They were wrong. I was going to teach them exactly how it feels when someone destroys what you love most.....The sound of something heavy splashing into the pool cut through the quiet afternoon like a gunshot. For a second, I thought maybe a chair had fallen in, or one of the dogs had jumped after a ball. Then I saw it — the white and pink sewing machine sinking slowly through the water, bubbles trailing up as the light caught the metal needle plate. My daughter, Lily, screamed.
“No!” She was already running toward the edge of the pool, tears streaming down her face before she even reached it. “That’s mine! Mom, that’s my machine!”
I froze in the doorway, my grocery bags still hanging from my arms. On the patio, my ex-husband Mark stood with his arms crossed, his jaw tight, looking everywhere but at Lily. Beside him, Rachel — his wife, my daughter’s stepmother — smiled. Smiled.
“She needed to learn a lesson,” Rachel said, her voice cold and sharp. “Maybe next time she won’t ignore chores when she’s told to do them.”
Lily dropped to her knees by the pool, reaching helplessly toward the sewing machine that had now sunk to the bottom. It had taken her six months of saving — babysitting, selling handmade tote bags online, cutting corners on everything. That machine was her dream. Her ticket to freedom.
Mark finally muttered, “Rach, maybe that was—”
“Don’t start,” she snapped. “You agreed she’s been getting spoiled.”
He didn’t answer. He didn’t move.
I put the groceries down slowly, my pulse pounding in my ears. “So you both thought this was reasonable? Throwing a child’s property into a pool because she wasn’t fast enough sweeping the floor?”
Rachel’s smirk didn’t falter. “It’s just a machine. She’ll live.”
Lily’s sobs broke something inside me. I walked over, knelt beside her, and put a hand on her back. Her small body trembled under my palm. The water shimmered blue, mocking us with its stillness. The machine sat at the bottom like a ghost of her effort.
I looked up at Rachel. “You think this will teach her something?”
She crossed her arms. “Yes. Respect.”
“Good,” I said, standing up. “Then you’ll understand when I teach you both a lesson about what it feels like to lose something that matters.”
For the first time, her smile faltered... Watch: [in comment] - Made with AI