Family relationships can get messy, especially when estrangement and unresolved issues are involved.

So, what would you do if your estranged father asked for money to buy birthday gifts for his stepkids?

In the following story, a young man finds himself dealing with this very dilemma.

Here’s what happened.

AITA for ignoring my father’s requests for money to buy his stepkids birthday gifts?

I’m (21m) estranged from my father.

The relationship is complicated. Our estrangement started to build when I was 13 and became an official estrangement when I turned 15, and in court, I was given the choice not to go to his house anymore.

He burdened me with things he was keeping from my mom, with bad choices he made, and with a secret that was always going to cause a lot of trouble.

He put the weight of our family’s happiness on my shoulders until I broke. My mom’s anger was more because of what he did to me than the stuff he did to her.

Not long after I stopped going to see Dad, he got married and became a stepfather to three kids. I’m not sure of the ages, but it’s twin girls and a boy.

Sometimes, when you help one person, someone else thinks you should help them too.

My younger siblings, 16f and 14m, still go to my father’s house. Their relationship with him is still okay. Not as bad as ours is but not good by any means.

But he didn’t mess them up like he did me, either.

Anyway, a few months ago, my mom fell on some hard times, and my sibling’s birthdays are 4 weeks apart, so I gave her some money for gifts for them.

I wanted to help her out. Especially when losing her job out of nowhere came at one of the worst times for her (she was dealing with a flare-up of a medical condition).

One of my siblings mentioned it to our father, and when he and his wife ended up short of getting the twins the gifts they wanted for their birthday, he reached out to me on social media to ask since I have him blocked on my phone.

Frustrated, he kept trying to avoid his father.

I ignored him. He asked again. I ignored him again.

I ended up blocking him when he tried again.

He caught me going to Mom’s after work the other day, and he asked me why I was so unwilling to help “my other siblings” when I helped Mom with my actual siblings’ birthday gifts.

I ignored him more and went inside, but he waited until I was leaving to go home, and he followed after me.

He asked again, and I told him because I don’t care about his wife’s children. They are nothing to me. And I do not feel any urge to help him make their birthdays special. I then told him to leave me alone.

Here’s where things took a turn for the worse.

He yelled after me that I didn’t need to take my hatred of him out on innocent kids. And that he knew I could afford to and he would have paid me back unlike my mom.

I yelled back that mom did pay me back, I just hadn’t expected or wanted her to.

He ended up stealing my brother’s phone the next time they were at his house and sent me a bunch of texts about my selfishness and coldness.

AITA?

No parent should ever put their child in that situation!

Let’s see how the folks over at Reddit weighed in on this issue.

This person wants to know how the dad plans to pay him back.

So true!

According to this person, the dad needs to take a hint.

Here’s someone who thinks a restraining order is needed.

The father needs to get a grip.

It’s time to man up and find out what it really means to be a dad.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check this one out about a man who created a points system for his inheritance, and a family friend ends up getting almost all of it.