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The original was posted on /r/AmItheAsshole by /u/Significant_Soup6472 on 2023-09-07 19:46:49.

I have a slightly complicated family dynamic. I’m 16f and I have an older brother who is now 19. My brother and I are full bio siblings. We share the same parents. We lost our mom to fatal disease when we were kids. My brother and my dad’s relationship had been bad throughout mom’s sickness and when she got too sick to care for us and ended up in a nursing facility, our maternal grandparents took custody of my brother. He wanted to be with them more than dad. It was for the best generally because I feel like the house would have been toxic with them living together.

I continued to have a relationship with my brother. We just didn’t live together anymore. My dad didn’t want it exactly but he knew that denying my brother access to me could backfire on him. He spoke to a lawyer to decide how much time we would see each other without courts potentially becoming involved or maybe CPS. So I got the bare minimum contact with my brother. Didn’t matter because he wasn’t able to tear us apart.

I was 7 and my brother was 10 when this arrangement first started. Our mom died 5 months into her time at the facility.

I was 9 when dad met his second wife. She has a daughter the same age as me. My stepsister is okay. But I don’t think of her as a sibling really. My brother has zero relationship with her. They have never met to my knowledge and I don’t know that they ever will.

My stepsister has been jealous from the beginning that I have a brother who doesn’t want to be her brother too, and that I don’t want to be her sister. She has questioned why he doesn’t live with us and why we’re not both equally treated like his sisters and why he’s dad’s kid but not living with us. She apparently drove her mom and my dad crazy when I was spending time with my brother and away from them. She’d ask to come most of the time and a few times she even approached my grandma and asked her to take her along.

Now that my brother’s an adult and he works and goes to college, our relationship is different. I see him more often because I just decide to go see him and he’ll meet me someplace. It bothers my stepsister more now that I’m with my brother more (I also see my grandparents more because of this). But then last weekend things got kinda worse. My brother and his boyfriend had gone to a Nickelodeon amusement park and he brought me back some Avatar The Last Airbender merch. We’re both huge fans so it was great. But my stepsister started asking more questions about why he never gives her anything and why he treats her so different. My dad said since I insist on maintaining contact with my brother despite his rejection of “our other sister” then I could explain to my stepsister. I retorted that it was his job as the adult to explain things to my stepsister. I also told him that he created this whole mess and he could fix it and he was now pawning it off onto me.

He said I should speak to him with more respect because he is my father. AITA?