“I Don’t Sponsor Strangers,” My Mother-in-Law Said. So I Stopped Paying Her Rent
I put the receipt into the folder and snapped the fastener shut.
“Oksana, should I heat up the borscht?” Kostya shouted from the other room.
“Heat it up.”
The transfer went through on the fifth, as always. Eighteen thousand rubles to Tamara Ivanovna for the one-bedroom apartment in Polushkina Grove, utilities on top.
I’ve been keeping that folder since 2019. It comes with my job: I’m a cost estimator, and for me, things need to be written down on paper, not stored in memory.
My mother-in-law had been renting that one-bedroom apartment since 2018. She sold her own place—they told me her late husband had left debts behind and she needed to pay them off. I had only just joined the family back then, so I didn’t interfere.
Kostya works as a mechanic at an auto repair shop. His income is enough for food, gas, and winter tires, and he sincerely believes that supporting his mother is a family responsibility.
Generally speaking, I used to think so too.
I paid her rent out of my bonuses. Each quarterly bonus covered three months of rent, with a little left over for a pair of shoes or some small purchase.
“Did you send the money to Mom?” he asked from the kitchen doorway, already holding a plate.
“I did.”
“Good.”
Conversations about money in our house always lasted exactly two sentences. Anything longer would have turned into an argument, and Kostya and I were always too busy to argue.
My phone vibrated on the oilcloth-covered table.
“Oksanochka…” Mom paused. “Grandma has been scheduled for surgery. On the twentieth. We have to pay for it.”
I sat down.
“How much are you short?”
“Sixty thousand. I gave everything I had. Aunt Raya gave twenty. There’s no one else to ask.”
Grandma is eighty-seven. She raised me while Mom worked double shifts at the factory. I still have a linen tablecloth in my kitchen with drawn-thread embroidery—Grandma made it and gave it to me for my wedding. I put it on the table for New Year’s and birthdays.
My next bonus was due on October twenty-fifth.
Grandma’s surgery was on September twentieth.
“I’ll find the money,” I told Mom.
Kostya put his plate in the sink.
“Ask my mother. She was bragging in July that she’d managed to save some money.”
“It feels awkward.”
“Well, where do we send money every month? Ask her.”
So I went.
My mother-in-law opened the door wearing a robe, with a towel wrapped around her head.
“You didn’t warn me you were coming,” she said instead of hello.
The kitchen smelled of valerian drops and fried onions. I sat at the table. She sat opposite me and moved the saltshaker two inches to the left so it lined up perfectly with the edge of the oilcloth.
She always does that. Nothing crooked stays crooked for long when she’s around.
“Galina Timofeevna, I need to borrow some money. Until October twenty-fifth, exactly. Sixty thousand.”
“I don’t have it.”
“You said this summer that you’d saved some.”
“For my teeth. My own teeth. I need lower-jaw dentures. I’ve been saving for a year.”
“It’s my grandmother. She’s eighty-seven, and the surgery has already been scheduled.”
She smoothed the oilcloth with her palm.
“She’s your grandmother. Let your mother deal with it—she’s her daughter. What does it have to do with me? I don’t sponsor strangers.”
The word strangers landed on the table between us, and I didn’t remove it.
“I’ve been transferring money to you every month for seven years.”
“What do you mean, seven years?” She lifted her head. “That’s Kostya helping his mother. My son. You’re just with him.”
That was when I stood up.
“Tomorrow at nine, we’re going to the market,” she called after me. “We’ll buy potatoes before the prices go up.”
“Tomorrow you can go yourself. A taxi from here to the market is two hundred rubles.”
“What, are you offended now?”
“No. I understood something. That’s different.”
Zhanna from the planning department lent me forty thousand on my word alone, without asking a single question. I withdrew another twenty thousand from my card—the money I’d set aside for winter tires.
“Did you ask your husband?” was all Zhanna said as she counted the bills.
“I asked. His mother.”
“And?”
“And nothing.”
Zhanna sighed and never brought it up again—not that day, and not afterward.
Grandma had her surgery on the twentieth. Everything went smoothly. A week later, she was discharged home, and Mom called me during lunch and cried into the phone with relief.
That same evening, Kostya spent a long time talking to his mother in the hallway and came back to me red in the face.
“Mom isn’t obligated to help. She’s not family to her.”
“She isn’t obligated,” I agreed.
“Then stop sulking.”
I wasn’t sulking.
That evening, I took out the folder, counted the receipts, and put it back in the drawer.
On Sunday, my mother-in-law came to our place without calling.
She was carrying a handbag.
The bag was dark burgundy, with a thick strap and a gold clasp. The tag was still dangling from a string.
My mother-in-law put it on the table between the breadbox and the paper with my medical instructions, then sat down.
“Mom, is that new?” Kostya asked as he poured her tea.
“New.”
“Expensive?”
“Forty-two.”
He lowered the kettle onto the stove without looking at her.
“Forty-two thousand? For a bag?”
“My money. I saved it from my pension.” She tore off the tag and slipped it into the pocket of her robe. “Am I allowed to own one nice thing or not anymore?”
“Mom, seriously…”
“What do you mean, seriously? I’ve carried the same patched-up bag my whole life.”
She hung the strap over the back of the chair so the clasp faced the room.
“It’s beautiful,” I said.
And it was true. The bag was very beautiful.
The paper with the medical instructions was in the way of displaying her purchase properly. She pushed it to the very edge of the table, near the saltshaker.
“You can’t pay for everyone’s treatment,” she said into her cup. “Let the government take care of them. We’re not millionaires.”
I picked up my phone and opened my chat with the apartment owner.
I typed the message right in front of them, saying every word aloud:
“Tamara Ivanovna, hello. Starting in October, I will no longer be paying the rent for the apartment. I’m giving you one month’s notice, as required by the lease.”
I pressed send and placed the phone next to the handbag.
“What did you just do?” My mother-in-law stared at the screen as though the message might somehow undo itself.
“The lease is in your name. From now on, you pay it yourself. Eighteen thousand plus utilities.”
“Kostya!”
Kostya was silent for a long time—about five seconds.
“Oksana, come on, this is too much. Mom, sit down. Nobody’s throwing you out.”
“Nobody is,” I said. “The person who’s actually responsible will simply pay from now on. Her son. And I’m just with him.”
She laughed.
Not angrily—cheerfully, the way adults laugh at a child who announces they’re running away from home.
“In a month, you’ll come running back to make the transfer yourself.”
She finished her tea, picked up her bag, and left. We could hear her on the landing for a long time afterward, explaining something to Valentina Sergeyevna from the fourth floor.
That night, Kostya sat up in bed.
“You understand that she’s a pensioner, right?”
“I understand.”
“She gets twenty-one thousand a month. Eighteen thousand goes toward rent. What is she supposed to live on?”
“Forty-two thousand,” I said. “Except now they’re hanging in the hallway.”
He lay back down and turned toward the wall.
In the morning, he called through the bathroom door and asked if I was going to cancel the message to Tamara Ivanovna.
“I’m not.”
“What about being reasonable? Half from you, half from her.”
“Kostya, half from me still means I’m paying. Just twice as slowly.”
He went to work without breakfast.
Somehow, she managed to cover October. At the end of the month, she came to our apartment carrying a bill, put it on Kostya’s knees, and sat beside him until he took out his wallet.
He gave her ten thousand rubles.
His own money—the savings he had been putting aside for a new compressor for the garage.
I found out from him two days later when we were calculating how much we had left for groceries.
“She’s my mother, Oksana. I can’t watch her live on canned food.”
“I’m not arguing. Pay for her. But now both of us know exactly how much it costs.”
Valentina Sergeyevna caught me near the mailboxes.
“Oksana, she was crying at my place yesterday. You’re still young. You’ll reach her age yourself one day.”
“I will, Valentina Sergeyevna. But by then, I won’t be paying rent for somebody else’s apartment.”
Meanwhile, my mother-in-law started dealing with the landlady herself.
First she called. Then she went to visit with homemade pies. Then she offered to pay on the twentieth instead of the fifth, when her pension arrived.
“She refuses to wait,” she complained to Kostya over the phone, loud enough for me to hear from the kitchen. “Young woman, but so greedy. I lived there for seven years and never even spilled water on the floor.”
She had lived there.
I had paid for it.
In November, my mother-in-law didn’t pay.
Not the full amount.
Not even half.
On the eleventh, she called me herself for the first time in two months.
“Tamara found new tenants. A family with a child, starting December first. I offered her half, but she won’t take it. Says she needs reliable tenants.”
We packed her things on Saturday.
Kostya couldn’t have moved everything alone: two sideboards full of junk, boxes, jars of preserves, winter coats in garment bags, and a sewing machine nobody had used in fifteen years.
I was packing her documents.
And inside a yellow folder with strings, between electricity bills, I found a purchase-and-sale agreement.
A two-bedroom apartment on Uritskogo Street.
July 2018.
I read it twice.
“Galina Timofeevna. You said there were debts.”
“There were debts too.”
“Did all the money go toward paying them?”
She was folding towels without turning around.
Then she answered evenly, without hesitation, as if she had been keeping this sentence ready for years.
“I gave the money to Alla. For her down payment. She has two children. All three of them were cramped into one room.”
“Then why was I paying your rent?”
“You weren’t paying. Kostya was helping his mother.”
Her phone rang immediately afterward, and because her hands were busy, she put the call on speaker.
“Mom, don’t lift any boxes. Let Kostya do it,” Alla’s cheerful, businesslike voice said. “We’d take you in, you know that. But we’re renovating until spring, and the bathroom is completely torn apart. You understand.”
“I understand,” my mother-in-law said.
“Tell Oksana hello.”
“I will,” my mother-in-law replied and ended the call.
Every July, Alla comes with her husband and two children for a month.
They stay in that exact same one-bedroom apartment.
My mother-in-law moves into our place for the month and sleeps on the sofa.
It had been that way for four years in a row.
I had ironed their sheets.
I had bought them a second blanket because the old one was scratchy.
Kostya stood in the doorway holding a box.
“You knew?” I asked.
“I knew.”
“You knew for six years and never told me.”
“What would it have changed?”
I placed the folder on the windowsill and said aloud, for all three of us to hear so nobody could ask me to repeat myself later:
“Let me make sure I understand. The apartment was sold in 2018. The money was given to Alla for her down payment. And since 2019, I’ve been paying the rent. Twenty-seven bonuses.”
“You actually counted?” My mother-in-law finally turned around.
“I’m a cost estimator. I count everything.”
“Then call Alla,” Kostya said. “Since you’ve counted everything, call her.”
I could have phoned her that very evening.
I could have told her about the contract, about July, about the ironed sheets and the second blanket.
I didn’t.
Not because she wouldn’t have given a single ruble, but because I would have had to ask.
I had asked this family for help exactly once—in September.
That was enough for me.
“Couldn’t Alla at least have contributed something toward the rent?” I asked later in the car.
“She has a mortgage,” Kostya said. “And children.”
“I had a mortgage too. During the first year I was paying for your mother.”
He turned the radio up.
We brought the last of her things to our place by seven.
Our small spare room had been used as a storage room. I moved out the vacuum cleaner and the boxes of tiles left over from the renovation.
Kostya carried the boxes one at a time, and by the end he was breathing through his mouth.
I carried bags and thought only about the fact that tomorrow was Monday and I had to submit the cost estimate for the third project.
“It’s a little cramped,” my mother-in-law said, looking around the room. “Well, I’ll put up with it.”
By nine that evening, she had rearranged everything to suit herself.
She moved the bed to the window, put the boxes of tiles in the hallway, and carried my ironing board out onto the balcony under the wet snow.
“It was in my way,” she explained.
I brought the board back inside and dried it carefully with a towel.
At ten, I went into the kitchen and couldn’t find my spices.
No turmeric.
No dried garlic.
No basil.
All six jars were in the trash can, sitting right on top.
“They were expired,” she said from behind me. “And they smell like a pharmacy.”
I took the jars out, washed them, and put them back on the top shelf.
“Your shelf is this one—the bottom one. Don’t touch anything else.”
“Look who thinks she’s the lady of the house,” she said and went to her room.
At night, we could hear her walking around the kitchen and opening cupboard doors.
In the morning, the kettle was on a different burner and the kitchen towel was hanging inside out.
Things escalated quickly after that.
The television started coming on at six in the morning at full volume because, according to her, “in my day, daughters-in-law got up before their husbands.”
I got up at seven.
Not once was I able to sleep through somebody else’s TV channel.
“Could you turn it down, please?”
“I don’t hear very well.”
Her hearing was perfectly fine.
Through the wall, she could hear Kostya and me talking at night and mention our conversation the next morning.
She scrubbed my frying pan with a metal scouring pad until gray scratches covered it—the Teflon came off along with the grease.
She threw my silk blouse, the only decent one I owned, into the washing machine with towels and bleach. It came out covered in blotches like an old map.
“You need to wash things in hot water,” she explained. “Otherwise there are germs.”
The creams from my bathroom shelf followed the spices into the trash.
The salt in the soup became her salt.
The tea became her tea.
Wednesday became meat day because “a man needs meat, not that pasta and grass of yours.”
Once, she rearranged every dish in the kitchen cupboards and didn’t tell me.
I spent five minutes looking for a mug.
On Friday, she washed the floor using one of my terrycloth towels because, as she explained, there weren’t enough cleaning rags in the house.
I threw the towel away myself, silently, because I didn’t want to start another argument first thing in the morning.
Out on the landing, she told Valentina Sergeyevna that her son was soft-hearted, which was why he stayed with a childless woman, while any other man would have left long ago.
On Saturday, she invited the neighbor into our kitchen for tea.
She took out my special-occasion tea set, poured the tea, and spoke about me while I was standing right there, as though I weren’t in the room.
“She counts everything and writes everything down on pieces of paper. Another woman would’ve had two children by now, but this one files receipts.”
Valentina Sergeyevna stared into her cup and stirred her sugar.
I washed the tea set after they left and put it on the top shelf beside the spices.
“A mother-in-law is still a mother,” Valentina Sergeyevna told me the next day by the elevator. “Be patient. She’s elderly. She doesn’t have that many years left to boss people around.”
“She isn’t my mother, Valentina Sergeyevna. To me, she’s seven years’ worth of receipts.”
Kostya came home late, ate in silence, and went to bed.
Once he said, “Well, where am I supposed to send her?”
That was our entire conversation for the week.
On Thursday, I was wiping the table.
The cloth was thick linen, with stitched edging and drawn-thread embroidery running along the side.
I spread it out on the table and saw the corner Grandma had embroidered.
“There was a burn hole in it,” my mother-in-law said from the stove. “I cut it up for cleaning rags. No point throwing away something useful.”
I placed the cloth in the middle of the table and called Kostya.
He came out of the room in his socks, phone in hand.
“Both of you sit down. I’m only going to say this once.”
They sat.
My mother-in-law sat up straight with her hands folded on the oilcloth, like someone waiting at a clinic.
“Galina Timofeevna, you are living in my apartment. I bought it before Kostya, and I paid off the mortgage a year before we got married. These are the rules. Television only after seven. Do not enter my room. Do not touch my belongings, my clothes, or my dishes. Don’t throw them away, wash them, or cut them into rags. The kitchen is shared. Your shelf is the bottom one. If you ruin something, you replace it from your pension. I’ll calculate the amount and tell you how much.”
“You’re going to lecture me in my own house?”
“It isn’t yours. Yours was sold in 2018.”
“I raised my son alone from the time he was fourteen!” She slapped her palm against the oilcloth so hard the saltshaker jumped. “I worked two jobs!”
“You raised him. And I paid you for it for seven years without saying a word.”
She stood up.
I remained seated and finished what I had to say.
“If you don’t like it, pack your things. Whether you continue living here or not is my decision and mine alone.”
“Kostya! Do you hear her? She’s throwing your mother out onto the street!”
I brought the yellow folder out of the drawer and placed it in front of my husband.
“Here are all the receipts since 2019. Rent, utilities, your mother’s medication, her dental work in 2023. Open it and say out loud who has been supporting whom in this house.”
He opened it.
He went through the papers slowly, one by one, the way someone reads another person’s documents in an office.
“What if she leaves?” he said without looking up. “Where is she supposed to go? Alla won’t take her in.”
“Then she stays here. Under my rules.”
“Kostya,” my mother-in-law said louder. “Kostya!”
“Mom,” he said without lifting his head. “Go to bed.”
She slammed her door so hard the glasses in the cabinet rattled.
Kostya placed the receipts back into the folder, lining them up carefully corner to corner, and went out to the balcony to smoke.
I remained alone in the kitchen.
I turned off the overhead light and sat down with my palms resting on the oilcloth.
I could hear the faucet dripping and the neighbors filling their bathtub through the wall.
For the first time in seven years, I sat there owing no one anything.
Not a ruble.
Not an explanation.
Two months passed, and the apartment became quiet.
The television in her room now comes on after seven.
She doesn’t enter my room.
Kostya bought me a new frying pan himself, without saying anything, and left it on the stove while I was out.
She doesn’t speak to me.
She communicates through her son.
“Tell her we’re out of bread.”
I answer the same way.
I printed the rules and put them on the refrigerator under a magnet.
She has never taken them down.
She has never acknowledged them out loud either.
The handbag hangs on a hook in the hallway.
She takes it with her in the morning when she goes out for bread, then hangs it back on the same hook afterward, adjusting the strap each time so it hangs perfectly straight.
Kostya started taking Saturday shifts.
Now he puts his entire paycheck on the kitchen table and waits while I count it.
We say maybe ten sentences to each other over the course of an evening.
Alla called her mother for New Year’s.
They talked cheerfully for about fifteen minutes.
She didn’t come to visit us.
She hasn’t sent any money even once.
Grandma walks around the apartment with a cane now and has already started complaining about Mom’s cutlets.
I’ll repay the last eight thousand I owe Zhanna in February.
There were no apologies.
Not from her.
Not from him.
And, to be honest, I’m not expecting any.
Alla’s renovation will be finished in May.
Whether she’ll take her mother in or not, I don’t know.
And nobody in our family asks that question out loud.
But on the fifth of the month, I didn’t transfer a single ruble to anyone.
I bought myself a pair of shoes instead—the first pair I’d bought for myself in seven years.
And I put the receipt into the yellow folder.