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The original was posted on /r/bestofredditorupdates by /u/LucyAriaRose on 2024-04-18 06:00:06.

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I am NOT the Original Poster. That is u/SelfServeSporstwash. He posted in r/AmItheAsshole

Mood Spoiler: tentatively hopeful

Original Post: January 30, 2024

I (27m) am the 3rd of 4 siblings and have always felt like an afterthought. Laurie (33f), Chuck (29m), and Jade (25f) have always gotten the first and best from my parents and each other. I get the leftovers if I’m lucky. I haven’t gotten a birthday present from any of my siblings in about 10 years, but I still get asked to pitch in for group gifts for each of them every year.

On Friday night we were having a family dinner and it honestly felt like every other sentence was a dig at me or a less than subtle brag by my siblings about something they have been given by my parents that I was denied. They talked about how nice almost all of our weddings were, but made sure to mention it was “ok” that my wife and I had a small low-key wedding. And it was Ok, we loved it. But they brushed over the fact that my parents paid for all of my siblings weddings… but not mine. Because somehow they couldn’t afford it… because they were saving up for Jade’s wedding.

They brought up how little student loans they have… because my parents helped them. All of them lived on campus at expensive 4 year schools. I lived at home and went first to a (very prestigious, very hard to get into) watchmaking school. I got paid to attend this school… so I paid rent at home. My parents paid for my tools. And I appreciate the help. I really do. But they paid 120-150k each for my siblings… they gave me 7k for tools. But to them it’s equal. When I went back to school on my own I didn’t ask for money and wasn’t offered it. When my brother went back to school they covered EVERYTHING without him even having to ask.

There were many other small moments (comments about cars and other lifestyle choices) but what made me snap was my brother and his wife mentioning their marriage being so great because they do things like spontaneous dates, like the one they had the prior Friday night. The Friday night where my parents called my wife and I last minute to cancel plans they had to eat dinner at our house because they had to watch Chuck’s kids because of an “emergency”. Turns out that “emergency” was a dinner for Chuck and my SIL at Texas Roadhouse. I had spent HOURS making my grandpa’s ziti and meatballs with homemade marinara because its my mom’s favorite.

I wanted more than anything to scream at them but instead I got up and left without saying a word and my wife followed me. when my mom called me later to ask why I left I just explained exactly why. I explained the favoritism, the unfairness, and the fact that it doesn’t feel like they care about me. She didn’t say much and I wasn’t really looking for an explanation or an apology in the moment, I just felt like it was self evident but if she really didn’t see it I’d spell it out. Evidently at least parts of what I said have been shared with my siblings because now Chuck and Laurie are furious at me and saying I ruined dinner and my mom is upset that I am hurt. They say I’m immature for “keeping score”

AITA?

Relevant Comments:

Commenter: NTA. Your siblings are keeping score as well. They use that score to belittle you every time they see you. Your parents, including your mom who is all of a sudden upset that you are hurt, have allowed that to happen. Your mom is only upset because you finally stood up for yourself and called them all out. Keep on keeping score, they certainly will.

OOP: honestly on the phone she didn’t seem agitated at all, but when I started explaining everything she just kinda got… sad I guess? She got real quiet and didn’t say much.

Commenter: NTA. I don’t know if this is the best solution. But, if I were you I would write everything down just like you told us. Then send it to each one of my family members in a group chat. Then block them. I would move on from a relationship with them and love them from a distance. Sidebar: Do you and all your siblings look exactly alike?

OOP: Jade is adopted… so no. But she has always been the baby and been treated as such anyway. My first draft had a lot more background but it was waaaaaay over the character limit. I look almost exactly like my paternal grandfather, I even have the same thing with my eyes where they were blue when I was born but have formed a brown ring around the outside as I’ve grown up. So there’s almost no possibility that I’m not my father’s son if that’s what you are getting at.

Jade is on my side incidentally, and she feels awful about the wedding thing, but she didn’t find out about them not paying for my wedding until about 6 months ago, which is 6 months after her wedding. She assumed that they had paid for part of my house or something, because verbally that had always been the deal. But no, I got to pay for my own wedding and my parents never honored the long standing agreement of “we have money saved for each of you and you can either use it for a wedding or anything else you want as a wedding gift when you get married”.

This is not Jades fault. She didn’t ask for any of this. She didn’t even get to plan her own wedding, my mom and Laurie did that. It was extravagant because mom and Laurie wanted it to be extravagant. Jade and her husband mostly hang out with my wife and I when they are in town. That has been a pattern for a loooong time. Family gives her stuff she didn’t ask for to I guess make up for her early childhood sucking, and it’s often at the expense of me. But since she was like 6 she’d always then share it back with me. Jade and I are fine, she shouldn’t have been responsible for policing the fairness of the adults in our lives.

Commenter: Have you straight out laid all this information in-front of your family like you told us? Or have you personally been taking all this in yourself?

I’m glad your sibling Jade is empathetic with you.

OOP: The Friday night phone call with my mom was the first time I laid more than one incident at a time out for anyone. It’s also the most thorough I’ve ever been about explaining any single incident because it’s the first time I didn’t get interrupted. We were on the phone for 1.5 hours and I was talking for most of it.

Commenter: You seem like an emotionally strong person. Sometimes when people know they can’t get to you, they can’t help but keep trying. Says more about them.

question- if you weren’t related would you even hang out with these people? You do get to choose your family, you know? Don’t worry about rocking the boat, sail your own.

OOP: I’d definitely still hang out with Jade and her husband, as well as my grandparents. But my Oma (dad’s mom) already sees me more than anyone else in my immediate family and my pop-pop (mom’s dad) has spent more time with me that the other grandkids since I was a child. I have autism and he almost certainly would have been diagnosed had he been born today. We both need breaks from crowds and we have similar sensory issues so we’d bail on family gatherings to go play bocce for as long as I can remember.

Mini Update/Clarification in Comments: January 31, 2024 (Next Day)

I don’t know where the best place to put all this so I’m putting it here if that’s ok. My first draft contained some of this info but I had to edit a lot to get down to the character limit. Some of this has been shared in other comments but I’m just consolidating in hopes this is seen and answers questions.

1**:** there is no reason to believe I am not my father’s child. The list of genetic coincidences that would be necessary for that to be the case is long and not worth rehashing. He doesn’t have any male relatives that could explain it either. He has one sibling, my aunt, and none of his cousins have ever been in his life, or even remotely local. I look just like my paternal grandfather. I always have. He died when my father was young but by all accounts he was a good father and is remembered fondly.

2: my younger sister has been the beneficiary of many if not most of the things my parents chose not to give to me, but she did not ask for any of that and has been one of the only people consistently trying to make it right. I mean for goodness sake she was trying to fix it when she was 6. She has definitely not seen everything, but what she has seen she has tried to correct. She is perhaps guilty of assuming the best of people and not asking questions, but she isn’t heartless and getting angry at her isn’t going to fix anything. We talked for a long time after I posted this. She had been told she was was contributing to a birthday gift for me every year since at least 2018. She gave money to my older sister to buy my wife and I tickets to my favorite soccer team, and then when my wife and I inevitably posted about going to games she assumed one of the games we went to each year was the gift she had been contributing money towards. There is a lot of backstory there but the gist of it is Jade and I have always gotten along well, and Jade does not participate in singling me out negatively. She and her husband spend time with my wife a…

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