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Every family has a golden child dynamic buried somewhere, but most of them don’t come with a literal financial paper trail.
One woman grew up footing the emotional and financial bill for a sibling whose investment mistakes cost her a senior trip and put her into student loan debt.
Fast forward a couple decades, and that same brother is now paying off the family house and buying cars, while she’s still waiting for so much as a nod of acknowledgment for anything she’s ever done.
So when she finally said the quiet part out loud, it led to an ugly argument at her sibling’s birthday dinner.
You’ll want to keep reading for this one.
AITA for finally telling my parents they have two children, and it is not fair how much attention they have always given my brother?
My (F) brother’s 36th birthday recently passed, and our parents, especially our dad, gave my brother the world.
My brother is on the spectrum. He is brilliant but also socially and emotionally lacking.
Her brother has never been responsible with money, which came back to negatively impact her too.
My brother’s focus with autism has always been investing. Growing up he lost our parents a lot of money, which made my childhood not all that great. I was not able to attend my senior trip, was forced to take out loans for school.
Many of my brother’s investments from the 2010s have paid off, especially the rebounds from COVID. He paid off our parents’ home, bought them new cars, he essentially covers everything for them.
Maybe I am bitter, because my parents never acknowledge anything I have done, and for my brother, no matter what he does it is always something magical.
Finally, she couldn’t hold in her feelings any longer.
On his birthday I lost it cause they keep comparing our lives, and told them how I really felt.
My brother feels like I hate him. My parents feel I am being unreasonable cause my brother is different.
I told them they are this way cause he has become their retirement plan, and he does it because they are all he has or has ever known.
AITA?
These feelings were bound to come out eventually.
Redditors take to the comment section to share their takes.
If it were this user, they’d handle it like this.
The parents definitely aren’t totally blameless here.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a mom who wants her daughter to help pay for her own cell phone, but her daughter says she can’t force her to get a job.
This user doesn’t have much sympathy for the woman.
There’s a difference between loving your child unconditionally and treating one child’s wins like miracles while treating the other’s like background noise.
Being subjected to this arrangement is bound to breed resentment, and a lifetime of resentment can’t stay bottled up forever.
Was it ideal that it happened to come out at her sibling’s birthday dinner? Of course not. But this is an issue that needs to be addressed, and if this is what it takes to get her family to pay attention, then so be it.