I Moved In To Help My Daughter With Her Triplets, But I Just Found Out She Is Drugging Me Every Thursday. She Thinks I Have Dementia, But I Am Actually Recording Everything She Says In The Nursery. How Do I Tell The Police My Own Daughter Is A Monster?

The Thursday Pattern

Thursday evening, I started to notice a pattern. Every Thursday was when my quarterly inheritance payment came through. Robert had been careful with money; his life insurance and retirement accounts were substantial and he’d set them up to pay out to me in installments.

Every 3 months, a significant sum hit my checking account. And every Thursday evening, Emma asked me if I wanted tea.

“Mom, you look tired. Let me make you some chamomile tea. It’ll help you sleep.”

I’d always accepted. I’d sit in the living room sipping the tea Emma made, feeling grateful for such a thoughtful daughter. Within 20 minutes, I’d feel drowsy. Unusually drowsy.

I’d head to bed early and I’d sleep hard. So hard that I wouldn’t wake up even when the babies cried. The next morning, Emma would tell me she’d handled the night shift, that I’d needed the rest.

But this Thursday, something clicked. The receipt. The medicine dropper. The strange nighttime visits to the nursery. Emma’s insistence that I drink the tea she made. The way Brad watched me whenever I held my teacup, his eyes tracking it to my lips.

I felt sick. Surely not. Surely my own daughter wasn’t drugging me. But as I sat there at the kitchen table watching Emma fill the kettle, I knew. I knew with a certainty that made me want to vomit.

“Actually, honey, I think I’ll skip the tea tonight,”

I said.

“My stomach’s a bit off.”

Emma’s hand froze on the kettle handle just for a second, then she smiled.

“Oh, okay, Mom. Can I get you some ginger ale instead?”

“No, thank you. I think I’ll just head to bed early.”

I saw them exchange a look. Quick, but I caught it.

The Betrayal Revealed

That night I didn’t sleep. I lay in my bed watching the crack under my door, waiting. At 2:43 a.m., I heard it again. Footsteps in the hallway. The nursery door opening and closing.

I got up silently and pressed my ear against my door. The voices were clearer this time because I wasn’t groggy, because there was no tea sedative dulling my senses.

“Did you check the bank account?”

That was Brad.

“Yes, the deposit came through this afternoon. $47,000.”

Emma’s voice.

“And the documents?”

“I have them. I practiced her signature. It’s perfect. Once she’s had the tea and she’s out cold, I’ll go in and get her to sign them in her sleep. She’ll never know.”

My hand flew to my mouth. Oh god. Oh god. They were forging my signature. They were accessing my inheritance account.

“What about the babies?”

Brad again.

“Just enough to keep them quiet. Not too much. Just enough so they sleep through and Mom doesn’t wake up to check on them. We can’t risk her being alert and noticing anything.”

They were drugging my grandbabies. My own daughter was drugging her children. I stumbled backward, my legs weak. I sat on the edge of my bed, my mind racing. What else had they done? How long had this been going on?

I grabbed my phone and opened my banking app with shaking fingers. I logged into Robert’s inheritance account, the one I rarely checked because the quarterly payments came automatically. The balance made me gasp. It was almost $200,000 less than it should be.

I scrolled through the transactions. Withdrawals. Large withdrawals signed with my electronic signature. Transfers to accounts I didn’t recognize going back 8 weeks.

Since the second week I’d been here, they’d been doing this. Almost from the beginning. Every Thursday: tea, drugged sleep, forged signatures, stolen money. And they were drugging the triplets to cover their tracks.

I sat there in the dark, my phone’s glow illuminating my face, and felt something I’d never felt before. Not just betrayal, not just hurt, but a cold, calculated fury.

This was my daughter. My child. I’d raised her alone after her father left when she was six. I’d worked two jobs to put her through college. I’d loved her unconditionally. And this was how she repaid me? By stealing from me. By drugging me. By endangering her own children, my grandchildren.

Gathering the Evidence

But I wasn’t some helpless old woman. Robert had always said I had a steel core.

“You’re stronger than you think, Margaret,”

he’d told me during his final days.

“Promise me you’ll be okay. Promise me you’ll fight for yourself.”

I promised him then, and I was going to keep that promise now. The next morning, Friday, I acted normal. I smiled at breakfast. I cooed at the babies. I thanked Brad for making coffee.

Inside, I was planning. I couldn’t go to the police, not yet. I needed proof. Concrete, undeniable proof. My word against theirs wouldn’t be enough, especially since they could claim I was confused, grieving, maybe even senile.

I was 62, but I could imagine Brad painting me as a batty old woman losing her grip on reality. No, I needed evidence. During my teaching career, I’d always been good with technology. I’d had to be to keep up with my high school students. I knew how to use computers, smartphones, cloud storage, and I knew how to shop online.

That Friday afternoon, while Emma was at work and Brad was in his home office for a marathon video conference, I used my iPad to order three items from Amazon with next-day delivery: two wireless hidden cameras disguised as phone chargers and one audio recording pen.

Saturday, while they took the babies to a pediatric checkup, I set up the cameras. One I plugged into an outlet in the nursery, positioned so it faced the cribs. The other I plugged in near the dining room table where I’d seen Emma photographing documents. The pen I kept in my pocket.

I also did something else. I called my bank’s fraud department.

“I think someone may be attempting to access my account,”

I told them.

“I’d like to freeze all transactions until I can come in person with proper identification.”

The representative was sympathetic and efficient. Within an hour, the account was locked. Then I waited.