AITAH for telling my sister the reason why our family isn’t close with her kids?
Apologies in advance for how long this may be but this situation has been going on your years.
I f24 has an older sister who’s 28, and she has three kids (f6, f4 and. f3). When my oldest niece was born, my sister was very strict and overprotective. The type of parent that had rules that you couldn’t meet the baby until they were 6 months or you couldn’t ask to hold the baby because in her own words “why are you so obsessed with holding and touching my kid”. Everyone in my family thought she was only extreme because she was a new mom but when her behavior didn’t change after her second one, everyone just stopped caring to get close to them. Like if we see saw them then that’s nice but if we didn’t then that was fine. The only people who would still make effort was our mother and maybe our father sometimes.
That however changed when I gave birth to my son who just turned 1. I knew from the start that I didn’t wanna isolate him and since he was born he’s been surrounded by family that absolutely adores him. I tried to give my sister the talk on how she’s incredibly blessed to have a village and she needs to take advantage before she burns herself out trying to raise three kids on her own but my advice always fell on deaf ears.
Anyways, here’s when the situation happened. On Christmas, everyone was set to meet at my parents house. That’s where everyone has dinner and opens more presents, it’s a day filled with love and comfort. My sister is always invited but usually doesn’t show and instead makes some lame excuse. On Christmas eve, she texted us very last minute that she was coming with her family after telling us before that she wouldn’t make it. By this time it was like 6pm and we quickly had to buy small gifts from Walmart so her kids would have something to open. We genuinely had no idea what her kids liked so we got things that kids there age would enjoy. We got home, wrapped them, and continued the festivities.
The next day, she arrived with her kids and then came the time to open presents. Everyone was very happy but my sister had a very displeased look on her face once her kids revealed their gifts. My parents do amazing on buying gifts because they really pay attention to detail but it was hard to do for my nieces because everyone has only seen him maybe 6 time in the past 2 years. I ended up asking if she was okay and she just nodded. For the whole rest of the day, her kids were just sitting on the couch and just quietly watching TV. We all tried to talk to them and include them but they were shy and clung to their mom.
After dinner, I was helping my mom in the kitchen and my sister walked in and just looked at us. She ended up asking why our family seemed to favor my son over her kids and she responded how she felt heartbroken that her kids seemed like outsiders to their own family. For a second the whole kitchen was quiet, I though my mom was gonna respond but she didn’t. Eventually I told her that it was her own doing, she isolated her kids and went full on helicopter mom and even got snappy at us when we wanted to help. Nobody is gonna beg to have a relationship with her kids. My mom ended up agreeing and voiced how it hurt to consistently get rejected when all she wanted to do was make my sister’s life easier. She then said to stop before from being upset and just stopped caring as much and spent her energy on the family she didn’t have to fight to see. This ended up blowing into a whole argument of her twisting our words and she ended up practically dragging her kids out.
We didn’t hear from her and nobody reached out until we decided to invite her to my dad’s 50th birthday dinner. That’s when we found out we were all blocked from everything. One of my cousins sent me screenshots of my sister posting about how awful families can be and etc. The way I see it is why ask a question if you weren’t ready for an answer?
AITAH?
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