The Ultimate Catfish
I’m 21, and my mom is 53. I live with my mom while I go to college. Throughout my whole life, she has never dated or had a relationship. She’s never even really shown an interest in dating. This changed about half a year ago, when she signed up for a couple of online dating sites. She talks to me about the guys she chats with a lot and she spends a lot of time talking to them.
Like, she’s on her phone all day messaging them and she literally loses sleep because she stays up all night talking to them. It’s something I’ve been worried about with her, that her talking to these guys is negatively affecting her life. She’s missed work and appointments because of losing sleep or getting distracted and being late. But it suddenly came to a crisis.
I was using her phone yesterday to take pictures as her camera is a lot better than mine. While I was using it, she got a message from one of these guys. It said something like “Wow, the red hair looks amazing”! Now, I had dyed my hair red that day so I thought she sent the guy a picture of it. The thought made me uncomfortable, as I don’t want her to be sending pictures of me to people I don’t know.
I get paranoid about that kind of stuff. So I looked at her messages. I know it’s a trespassing of privacy to snoop, but I needed to see what and how much she sent of me. I couldn’t believe what I was looking at. The message she sent to him was a picture I had posted on Facebook of my new hair, and the caption she used was “I’m feeling creative, what do you think of my new look”?
That confused the heck out of me, obviously. The idea that she was pretending to be me didn’t even cross my mind at that point because of how ridiculous it seemed. So I kept reading back in her messages. He referred to her as “Marie”, which is my middle name. I looked in the sent pictures…and none of them were of her. There were dozens of me.
I’m a makeup enthusiast so I post photos of my makeup looks on Instagram and Facebook almost every day, and almost all of the ones I posted from the past month were sent. There were even pictures of me in swimsuits from beach trips. I immediately felt sick and couldn’t stop digging through the messages. Some of the messages were EXTREMELY racy nature.
It made me so nauseated to read the things the guy said about me. And even more nauseated to read the stuff my mom said about me. Like talking about my red lipstick. I looked through more of the people she was messaging and there were four other guys she was sending my pictures to. I just put her phone back and went to my room.
I feel so sick and angry and scared. My mother has never been inappropriate like this to me in my entire life. I was raised really conservative and Christian so she’s barely ever even mentioned intimate things to me. When she first started using these sites, she would complain to me about how no one was interested in her and that she wasn’t pretty enough to get attention.
She’s morbidly obese and middle-aged and disabled and doesn’t really take care of her appearance. Nonetheless, she has REALLY high standards for guys (like 30s, tall, muscular). I’m not gorgeous or anything, but I take pride in making myself look good and taking care of myself. I don’t know what to do. I haven’t talked to anyone about this because this is so insane and I’m embarrassed and disgusted to mention it to my friends and have them know.
I’ve been avoiding my mom and haven’t let on that I know. I told her I was feeling sick so I could stay in my room and stay away from her. I don’t have any idea what to do about this, how to confront her, or if I even should. I’m so scared of how she’ll react and I just feel so embarrassed. These guys could find me online. They could be crazy and one could get upset with her and he might even look for me in real life.
I don’t know what to do, I’m so confused and scared.