I’m thirty-two years old, five months pregnant, and living in a house that unfortunately comes with a permanent guest: my mother-in-law, Serena.
Now, don’t get me wrong. Serena isn’t a bad person. She’s helpful around the house, cooks a mean casserole, and loves her grandbaby-to-be more than life itself. But she has one habit that drives me absolutely insane.
She snoops.
And I don’t mean harmless curiosity or an innocent peek in the fridge. No. Serena snoops like it’s her life’s mission.
Mail, drawers, text messages left open on the counter, even my laundry basket, nothing is safe. But her favorite target of all? Packages.
The moment a box lands on our porch, she’s out the door faster than a cat spotting a can opener. I’ve watched her through the front window: she’ll pick up the box, squint at the label (which clearly says my name), and without hesitation rip it open like a kid on Christmas morning.
And every single time, she gives the same tired excuse.
“Oh, I thought it was for the house!” she says, all sweet and innocent, like that explains why she’s currently holding my maternity leggings or a new set of candles I ordered for the nursery.
I used to roll my eyes and move on. I’d remind myself she’s just “curious,” that she means well, that she’s excited about the baby. My husband, Grant, would tell me, “That’s just Mom being Mom.”
But that excuse stopped working the day she ruined something truly special.
I’d been planning our gender reveal for weeks. Nothing extravagant, just a small backyard dinner with close family and a few friends. I’d ordered a special reveal card from an Etsy seller, something delicate and beautiful, sealed with wax and wrapped with a tiny ribbon. The idea was that Grant and I would open it together, just the two of us, before we shared the news with anyone else.
I wanted that moment. Our moment.
But when I came home from work one afternoon, Serena was standing in the living room, holding the card in her perfectly manicured hands. The wax seal had been broken.
She was grinning like she’d just won a prize at the county fair.
“Oh my stars, it’s a BOY!” she hollered, waving the card in the air like a trophy. “A baby boy!”
Grant froze mid-step, his face falling. I could feel my heartbeat pounding in my ears.
That was supposed to be our moment.
Instead, Serena had stolen it, just like she stole every bit of privacy I tried to carve out in this house.
The worst part? She didn’t even seem sorry. She just kept beaming, telling everyone on the family group chat before we’d even processed it ourselves.
Grant muttered, “Mom, seriously?” but she brushed it off.
“Oh, don’t be so dramatic! We were all going to find out eventually,” she said, still smiling.
I didn’t scream. I didn’t cry. I didn’t even argue. But inside, I was seething.
That night, after everyone had gone to bed, I sat on the couch with my laptop and made two very special online orders.
Both were overnight deliveries. Both had my name on the shipping label. And both, I knew, would be impossible for Serena to resist.
I even made sure the first one looked tempting, just the kind of thing that would pique her nosy curiosity.
See, our porch has a camera. And I’d noticed a pattern: any time I got a package with “fragile” or “handle with care” on it, Serena would grab it the second it arrived. She couldn’t help herself.
So I decided to use that to my advantage.
The next morning, right on schedule, I heard the familiar thunk of a box hitting the porch. I was in the kitchen making breakfast, pretending not to notice, when I heard Serena’s voice from the hallway.
“Oh, another delivery!”
Her heels clicked rapidly across the tile.
I peeked at the camera feed on my phone. There she was, hair perfectly set, robe cinched, crouching like a pirate uncovering buried treasure. She looked both thrilled and guilty as she picked up the box addressed to me and hustled it inside.
I turned back to my coffee and waited.
Ten minutes later, a shriek rang out from the hallway that made me jump.
It was the kind of sound you make when you see a spider the size of your hand or, in this case, something far worse.
I walked in, keeping my expression neutral.
“Everything okay, Serena?” I asked sweetly.
She stood frozen, staring down at the open box on the counter. Inside was a very realistic, very graphic silicone… object. The kind of thing no Southern lady would ever dare admit to knowing existed, let alone touching.
Her face turned a shade of red I didn’t know was possible. She clutched her pearls literally and sputtered, “What on earth is this filth doing in my son’s house?”
“Oh,” I said lightly, pretending to be embarrassed. “That must be one of those novelty gag gifts. You know how baby showers get these days. Someone must have sent it early!”
She looked horrified. “Well, I certainly hope you’re not planning to—”
I cut her off. “Oh, I wouldn’t worry, Serena. That’s not even the good one. There’s another package coming later today.”
Her eyes widened. “Another one?”
I smiled. “Yep.”
That was all it took. For the rest of the day, she hovered near the window like a guard dog. Every time a delivery truck slowed down outside, she’d perk up.
By the time the second package arrived that evening, I could practically feel the tension in the air.
I watched through the camera again. The driver dropped the small brown box on the porch, and just like clockwork, Serena swooped in.
She carried it to the kitchen, opened it right there on the counter… and froze again.
This time, instead of something scandalous, she found something terrifying.
Inside the box was a small, realistic-looking snake. Plastic, of course, but incredibly lifelike, complete with a coiled body and gleaming eyes. I’d even ordered one with a battery-powered mechanism that made it wiggle slightly when the lid opened.
Serena screamed so loud I thought the neighbors might call 911.
She stumbled backward, tripped over the rug, and landed in a heap on the floor.
Grant came running from the living room, shouting, “Mom! What happened?”
She was pointing at the box, trembling. “There’s a snake! She—she got a snake delivered to the house!”
Grant looked inside, blinked, and then looked at me.
“Is this… fake?”
I shrugged. “Guess you shouldn’t open boxes that don’t belong to you, huh?”
Serena’s eyes darted between us. For once, she didn’t have a comeback. She just stood up, huffing and muttering something about “boundaries” and “young people these days.”
I didn’t say a word.
That night, the house was silent. Serena barely spoke at dinner, and when she did, her voice was shaky. I think the sight of that “snake” genuinely shook her.
After that day, she never touched another one of my packages again.
But the real surprise came a few weeks later.
One afternoon, while I was folding baby clothes in the nursery, Serena knocked softly on the door.
“Can I come in?” she asked.
I nodded, curious.
She sat down on the edge of the chair, looking unusually small. “I owe you an apology,” she said quietly. “For… invading your privacy. For opening your things. I didn’t realize how much it bothered you.”
I was taken aback. Serena never apologized. Ever.
She sighed, twisting her wedding ring. “When I lost my husband, I didn’t have much to do. When you and Grant let me move in, I guess I started treating this place like my own. But it’s not. It’s your home now. And I crossed a line.”
I softened a little. “I appreciate that, Serena. Really. I know you mean well—I just need some space sometimes.”
She nodded, eyes glistening. “I understand. And for what it’s worth…”—her lips twitched into a faint smile—“…that thing in the first box? I nearly fainted.”
I laughed. “That was kind of the point.”
From that day forward, things got easier. Serena still hovered now and then, still asked a few too many questions, but she no longer snooped. Every package that arrived was left untouched on the porch until I picked it up.
And when the baby finally came, a healthy little boy named Caleb, she was the proudest grandmother alive.
Looking back, I don’t regret the prank one bit.
Because sometimes, when someone refuses to learn a lesson the easy way, you have to teach it the hard way.
And nothing teaches a nosy mother-in-law about boundaries quite like a vibrating “gag gift” and a plastic snake with a mean wiggle.
Months later, when we were sitting around the kitchen table after dinner, Serena suddenly chuckled out of nowhere.
“You know,” she said, “I still check the porch sometimes, just to make sure there aren’t any more surprises coming for me.”
Grant laughed, nearly choking on his iced tea. “Mom, you’ve learned your lesson, haven’t you?”
She gave me a sideways glance and said, “Let’s just say I now believe curiosity really can kill the cat.”
We all burst out laughing.
And though she’ll probably never admit it, I think a tiny part of her respects me more now for standing up for myself, for setting a boundary she couldn’t ignore.
Because when you live under the same roof with family, sometimes it’s not the big confrontations that change things. Sometimes it’s one well-timed, well-planned delivery that sends the message loud and clear:
Some boxes just aren’t meant to be opened.
