AITAH for leaving my younger sister out of family stuff in honor of our late mom?
My parents had four kids before they died and I’m the second youngest. I (23) was 7 and my older siblings were 8 and 10 when mom died. My younger sister (16) was two days old. Four years after mom died our dad started dating again and he remarried three years into their relationship. For my younger sister she was mom. She called her mom before dad and his wife even married and eventually got adopted by our dad’s wife.
My younger sister doesn’t see our mom as her anything. She knows mom is her biological mom and the mother to all four of us but she sees it different. She’ll sometimes say our dad’s wife is the mom to all four of us because she was there and loved us and worked so hard to be a good mom. It has led to tension between us three older siblings and her. But it’s not just that. My younger sister can be a disrespectful little shit about our mom because she doesn’t like the fact we get together with mom’s family to remember her or we do our thing as siblings but we don’t do sibling stuff for our dad’s wife. She has asked us what’s so special about some dead woman that her mom can’t do better. Or she said mom’s death was no big deal because it made room for our dad’s wife.
Dad has come down hard on her for saying that stuff and so have the three of us but it made no difference. She’ll say it when she gets into the mood to start stuff. I suspect it comes from her issues with how we treat our dad’s wife different than she does. But the three of us do not consider our dad’s wife as anything more than that. None of us would take care of her the way we would our parents, none of us consider her a parental figure and none of us would carry on speaking to her if her and dad divorced or dad died. This is something that could be happening because they separated several months ago and things about the future are undecided according to dad. The separation and possible divorce has been a topic our sister has brought up. She wanted us to do Mother’s Day with her and our dad’s wife and got pissed we did something for mom with mom’s family. She said some things that we just couldn’t get over, even if she’s 16 and going through a lot of stuff. So we agreed we would not include her in anything related to mom going forward.
Last week me and my older siblings celebrated mom’s birthday. My younger sister was so hurt that we did a sibling thing for mom without her and that we didn’t say anything or try to include her and she was upset at the oldest for posting something on social media about it. The stance the three of us took was you have always said she’s not your mom so we didn’t feel like including you to shit all over her. Dad said she’s young and we should always leave some room for her. My sister said we want her to feel like she’s not a real sibling and we want her to feel bad about loving dad’s wife as her mom. It’s not what we want but the truth is her presence always ruins this stuff for us and I would rather her feel left out than hate her more for talking shit about mom.
AITAH for being one of the three people to not include her when it was something for our shared mom even if she doesn’t see her as her mom?
