Woman Abandons Mother at Birthday Dinner Over Drama Involving Half-Siblings

The anonymous woman shared most of her story with Reddit’s infamous AITA (“Am I the A–hole”) forum, but readers didn’t quite get a complete understanding of her situation until she started replying to them in the comments.

There was definitely a lot more going on under the surface than a mother, a daughter, a birthday dinner and some missing half-siblings — and it left Redditors feeling heartbroken, frustrated, and angry.

Read on to hear the first version of her story, but then keep going to find out what was really going on underneath it all.

“My mom turned turned 60 last week and I took her out to dinner to celebrate,” OP started 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, etc.”

“During dinner she talked about how my half siblings should have come,” she continued. “I told her she had the option to invite them if she wanted them there but I couldn’t and wouldn’t make contact with them.” That’s where the heart of this emerging drama stems from.

OP explained her choice of words by adding, “Couldn’t, because I have no contact info for them and we are not social media friends. Wouldn’t because they have been very clear they want no contact with me.”

She then offered some background as to how the family wound up this way. “My mom was happily married to my half siblings dad and they were a happy family. Then he died,” she wrote. “My half siblings were 12 and under at the time.”

What happened from there was a series of failed marriage for the mom and five years later, OP was born. “My half siblings didn’t see me as a sibling or as a member of their family. They view me, have always always viewed me, as an accident,” she explained. “As someone who should [n]ever have existed.”

“They did not want me to exist. They did not want another reminder that their dad was gone and mom was throwing herself at all kinds of men,” OP continued. “They wanted a neater family, where all the siblings had the same two parents.”

As a result, OP said she’s had minimal contact with her half-siblings, who mostly “ignored” her when she was younger. “It was rough being on the outside when I was small,” she admitted, adding that their mother “was never very stable or steady.”

“The contact with my half siblings lessened so much over time. They are not very close to mom either. But they check in on her from time to time. They speak to her occasionally. They send cards and stuff for birthdays and Christmas, for her though and not me,” OP added.

She wrote that she “attempted to make contact when I moved out by sending a follow request on social media, but they never accepted. That was it.”

With the full background established, OP returned to the birthday dinner with her mother. “During dinner she kept saying how I should reach out, how we should be close, I should have invited them and all kinds of stuff like that,” wrote OP. “I told her they wanted nothing to do with me and could she please drop it.”

“She kept pushing and especially on the topic 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 down 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 leaving my mom on her birthday because she wouldn’t stop talking about my half siblings?

As it turns out, OP had not nearly divulged the entirety of the story in her post, but she repeatedly expressed it in her responses to the comments she received. That is that she doesn’t feel loved by her mother, either, or at the least not nearly as loved as her half-siblings, because of their connection to their late father.

One commenter got the attention of OP with a message where they acknowledged the overall messiness of the situation, and how poorly OP had been treated by the mother and half-siblings. “View spending time with your mom and being able to take hard conversations with her like this on the chin as proof that you are better than your half siblings,” they suggested. “You are present and trying while they have completely disappeared.”

But OP explained that she “can’t take that stuff on the chin though.” She wrote that “it always serves as a reminder that I do not feel loved by my mom. I don’t think she hates me. But I don’t remember a time she has ever said she loves me.”

To make matters worse, OP wrote, “I have heard her say it to my half siblings. I have heard her say it about them. But to memory I don’t remember her saying it to me. Maybe she does say it and I can’t hear it. But I always felt like she saw me a mistake too and the only difference was she didn’t say it outright or show it as clearly as my half siblings did.”

She did clarify that while there’s a lot to unpack in her relationship with her mother, she does love her. “I love her. I do. But I don’t fee loved in return,” she wrote. “And I don’t have it in me to take the pressure and the blame for things not working the way mom wants them to.”

Most Redditors disagreed, though, believing that OP was perfectly within her rights to have had enough and removed herself from the situation. “She wasn’t just ‘talking about’ your half-siblings. She was repeatedly pressuring you, to try to get you to pressure your half-siblings into a connection,” wrote one.

“You didn’t walk out when she started on it again. It took several times of trying to change the subject and get her to leave off the pressure.”

“As much as I try to be a good daughter, I don’t think I was ever loved by her or at least not like she loves her first three children who are the children of the man she loves,” wrote OP, adding in another comment she wants to protect her future children so they don’t “feel lesser for being the grandkids of the wrong grandfather.”

“I don’t want that for them because being from the wrong person, even though it’s not your fault, is an awful burden,” she wrote.

With OP continuing to express her love for her mother, telling one Redditor, “She’s really all I have re family,” there were some who were encouraging her to give herself the same care she plans to give her children.

“Children are not meant to fix the emotional needs of parents,” wrote one commenter. “This poor OP has had a parent who has been emotionally immature their entire life. It isn’t their job to fix mom or her life. OP needs to start prioritizing themselves NTA.”

They also went in pretty hard on the mom in general for how she handled the whole situation. “She’s not acknowledging your half-siblings’ resentful behavior towards you – like you have some control over the fact that you aren’t in contact with them. It’s victim-blaming,” argued one commenter. “SHE could have invited them, but wanted to put the blame on you for not inviting them, despite the obvious reality of the situation.”

One Redditor suggested, “For your own mental health you need to put some boundaries in place. I strongly suggest you look into therapy to work through the issues around your childhood. I suggest going LC [“lo contact”] for a bit and put yourself first. It’s important to only keep people in your life that bring you joy – there’s no obligation to keep someone in your life because ‘they’re family.'”

What do you think?