u/Latter-Evidence-7124

This has been dragging on for months and I am honestly exhausted by it so I need people outside my family to weigh in.

My mum has always had a habit of expecting me to be available whenever she needs something sorted without actually checking whether I can do it.

She will fire off a message in the middle of the afternoon expecting me to drop everything and handle something, and if I do not respond straight away it turns into a whole argument.

Back in April I had something on after school and kept my phone on silent the way my dad and my teachers had encouraged me to, so I could actually focus on what I was doing. When I finished and checked my messages there was a bunch of texts from my mum and a voicemail where she was screaming at me because something had gone wrong.

The short version is that she had counted on me to handle something involving a younger family member that afternoon without actually telling me properly or checking that I was free. Because nobody showed up when they were supposed to, the younger family member tried to sort themselves out and ended up getting pretty badly hurt in the process.

When I got home my mum told me I should be ashamed of myself for not feeling worse about it. I told her I had never agreed to be responsible for this and she had known I had commitments that afternoon.

AITA for refusing to take the blame for something that happened because she did not plan properly?

some background. my cousin's son has had a pattern of targeting my partner over the past year. small things that family kept writing off as personality clashes or kids being kids. I bit my tongue every time because I did not want to make it a bigger thing than it needed to be.

last week my partner's laptop was damaged. it is a work machine, not cheap, something they use every day. someone who examined it confirmed the damage was deliberate. liquid had been introduced into the keyboard in a way that does not happen accidentally.

my cousin was in the house when it happened. she saw the aftermath. her response was that it probably was not as bad as it looked and that family does not handle things like this through courts.

I told her the repair or replacement cost would need to be covered. she picked up her bag and left.

since then I have had multiple family members texting me asking me to drop it.

a couple have called me dramatic. nobody has offered to help cover the cost.

the laptop needs to be replaced entirely. the quote came back higher than repair being viable. I am not in a position to absorb that cost because her son has had a pattern of behavior toward my partner that everyone kept excusing and this is where it ended up.

I have not filed anything yet. I am asking first.

WIBTA if I file?