After her mother couldn’t let go of the fact that her other children weren’t present at the birthday dinner, her daughter got up and left — but the reality behind her feelings reveals several layers of heartbreak!
An emotional woman takes to the internet after upsetting her mother to see if she was right to leave or should have stayed. However, it wasn’t until the feedback that the full reality behind her emotions came to light.
The unnamed lady shared majority of her history with Reddit’s famous AITA (“Am I the A–hole”) discussion forum, however, readers didn’t get a full understanding of her situation until she started responding to them in the comments.
There was undoubtedly a lot more going on under the ground than a mother, a daughter, a birthday dinner, and some missing half-siblings — and it left Redditors heartbroken, angry, and outraged.
Learn to listen to the core pattern of your story, but keep looking to find out what was in truth happening underneath all this.
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“My mom turned 60 last week and I took her out to dinner to celebrate,” OP began her story. “It was her, me (21f), my girlfriend (22f) and my mom’s best friend. I also spent most of that day with her and we went shopping, and lots of other stuff.”
“During dinner, she talked about how my half-siblings should have come,” she continued. “I let her know that she had the option to ask them if she wanted them there, but I could not and would not contact them.” That’s where the heart of this growing drama comes from.
OP defined her selection of phrases as including, “I couldn’t because I don’t have their contact information and we’re not friends on social media. I couldn’t because they’ve been very clear that they don’t want any contact with me.”
She then provided some background on how the family ended up this way. “My mother was happily married to my half-siblings’ father and they were a happy family. Then he died,” she wrote. “My half-siblings were 12 or younger at the time.”
They didn’t need me to exist. They didn’t need another reminder that their father was gone.
What followed was a string of failed marriages for her mother, and 5 years later, OP was born. “My half-siblings didn’t see me as a sister or as a member of their family. They see me, and have always seen me, as an accident,” she explained. “As someone who should (never) have existed.”
“They didn’t need me to exist. They didn’t need another reminder that their dad was gone and their mom was throwing herself at all sorts of men,” OP continued. “They wanted a more organized family, where all their siblings had the same two dads.”
Because of this, OP stated that she had minimal contact with her half-siblings, who “ignored” her especially when she was younger. “It was hard to be in their shoes when I was little,” she admitted, adding that her mother “was never very secure or regular.”
“Contact with my half-siblings has decreased a lot over time. They don’t seem to be very close to their mother either. However, they check up on her sometimes. They communicate with her sometimes. They send game cards and things for birthdays and Christmas, to her though, and never to me,” OP added.
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She wrote that she “tried to reach out when I moved by sending a request to watch on social media, but they never accepted. That was it.”
With the full story established, OP returned to the birthday dinner with her mother. “Throughout dinner she kept saying how I should reach out, how we should be close, I should have invited them, and all sorts of stuff like that,” OP wrote. “I told her they wanted nothing to do with me and could she please stop doing this.”
“She kept pushing and particularly on the subject of my relationship with them,” she continued. “We all tried to change the subject. When she wouldn’t let it go, my girlfriend and I left early without finishing because I was done.”
OP then shared, “My mom was crying on the phone to me the next day and the day after that asking how I could leave her.” And with that, she wondered: AITA for abandoning my mom on her birthday because she wouldn’t stop talking about my stepbrothers?
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Because it seems like the OP hadn’t disclosed nearly the entire story in her post, but she repeatedly expressed it in her replies to the comments she got. That she doesn’t really feel loved by her mother, or at least not as loved as her half-siblings, due to their connection to her late father.
One commenter called the OP out with a message where they acknowledged the overall mess of the state of affairs, and how poorly the OP has been treated by her mother and half-siblings. “Take spending time with your mother and being able to take tough conversations with her like that on the chin as proof that you’re better than your half-siblings,” they recommended. “You can be present and trying while they’ve completely disappeared.”
However, OP stated that she “can’t take it lying down, though.” She wrote that “it always serves as a reminder that I truly don’t feel loved by my mother. I don’t think she hates me. However, I can’t remember her ever saying she loves me.”
Young people are not meant to repair the emotional needs of their elders.
To make matters worse, OP wrote, “I’ve heard her say this to my stepbrothers. I’ve heard her say this about them. However, to the best of my memory, I don’t remember her saying this to me. Maybe she says it and I can’t hear it. However, I’ve always felt like she saw me in the wrong too and the only difference is that she didn’t say it directly or present it as clearly as my stepbrothers did.”
She made it clear that while there is a lot to unpack in her relationship with her mother, she loves her. “I really like her. I do. However, I don’t demand anything in return,” she wrote. “And I don’t have the stress and guilt of things not working out the way my mother wants.”
Most Redditors disagreed, however, believing that the OP was completely within her rights to have had enough and removed herself from the situation. “She wasn’t simply ‘talking about’ her step-siblings. She was repeatedly pressuring you, to try to get you to stress her step-siblings into a connection,” one wrote.
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“You didn’t leave when she started talking about it again. It took several attempts to change the subject and get her to stop stressing.”
“As much as I try to be a great daughter, I don’t think I’ve ever been loved by her, or at least not the way she loves her first three children, who are the children of the person she loves,” OP wrote, adding in another comment that she wants to protect her future children so they don’t “feel inferior for being the grandchildren of the wrong grandparent.”
“I don’t need this for them, because being the wrong person, even if it’s not your fault, is a terrible burden,” she wrote.
With OP continuing to express her love for her mother, telling one Redditor, “She’s truly all I have in family,” some encouraged her to give herself the same care she plans to give her children.
I don’t suppose she hates me. However, I don’t remember a time when she said she loved me.
“Young people are not meant to fix the emotional needs of older people,” one commenter wrote. “This poor OP had a parent who was emotionally immature their entire life. It’s not their job to fix their mother or her life. OP wants to start prioritizing themselves NTA.”
Also, they were quite a handful with their mother basically because of the way she dealt with the entire state of affairs. “She’s not acknowledging her stepbrothers’ resentful habits toward you—as if you have any control over the truth that you’re not in touch with them. It’s victim-blaming,” argued one commenter. “SHE may have invited them, but she wanted to put the blame on you for not inviting them, regardless of the clear reality of the state of affairs.”
One Redditor recommended: “For your own personal psychological well-being, you need to set some boundaries. I highly recommend seeking out a treatment plan to address the issues surrounding your childhood. I recommend going into LC (“lo contact”) for a while and putting yourself first. It’s important to only keep people in your life who bring you joy – there’s no obligation to keep someone in your life because ‘they’re family.’”
What do you think?