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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/AkatsukisGroupie on 2023-09-26 17:47:19.

I (22F) recently moved back to my parents’ house for my last year of college to save money since all of my classes are online this semester and next.

My boyfriend and I are sexually active. In the last few months, we got some new sex stuff (not crazy, just like restraints and handcuffs). I put them in a separate small box and on top wrote “Private: Do Not Open.” My mom and stepdad were very respectful of my privacy by letting me put it in the moving truck and were very good about not asking or touching the box. When we finished moving my stuff that day, my bf and I got food while they headed home and put my boxes in my room.

It’s been two months and I’ve moved some of the boxes around now that I’m finally fully settling in. This morning while my family was at work, I noticed the private box had been tampered with. I immediately asked my mom because she’s the only person I think would look, and after a few minutes of denial, she tells me that she did in fact look. She said she wanted to know if I was doing drugs, but when she saw the contents, closed it back up and didn’t say a word to anyone.

Today, I had my aunt to administer my birth control shot since she is a nurse, and when I got home, my mom was with said aunt on speaker phone and said, “Yeah, she just got back from meeting you,” to which my aunt made a joke to my mom about my bf and I using our sex stuff now that I got my shot. My mom immediately took it off of speaker and told my aunt she’d have to call her back.

I ask my mom what that was about and became super angry and embarrassed. My mom tells me that she has a right to look through my things regardless of how old I am, especially if I’m living under her roof. I say that that’s an invasion of privacy and there should be a mutual respect between two adults, but she said that I will never receive “full privacy” as an adult because she is my mom.

Here’s where I fear I may have been the asshole. I then told her that that attitude is exactly why I never opened up to her about traumas and why my 16y/o sister also doesn’t either. I told her that because she always tells other people business we confide in her about or that she finds out by snooping, is a big reason I’ve stopped telling her what’s going on in my life outside of what she absolutely needs to know.

She got super upset and started crying and said that I was an asshole for taking things that far because all she wanted to do was make sure I wasn’t doing any drugs or anything illegal. I told her that even if I was, it’s not her place to go through my things that I clearly said were private, even if she is a parent. I also said that if I was doing things that were illegal, I would be way more inclined to tell her if she didn’t tell everybody else my business.

My stepdad said that I was kind of an asshole for telling her that she was the reason we didn’t open up to her and made her feel like she was a bad mother, but my sister said it’s the truth and what she needed to hear. AITA?