u/Adariel

Throughout my childhood, my mom was perpetually victimized by my existence. She chose to have me late in life (both parents over 40) as an “oops” baby with more than a decade gap with my two older siblings, and then proceeded to resent the hell out of actually having to parent. Yes, even the bare legal minimum like needing to feed me or send me to school.

I was always told I’d understand once I became a mom myself, but now that I’ve become one, the mentality of “your parents owe you nothing, but you owe them everything for giving birth to you” is even crazier to me and just makes me so angry.

So this is a really long post but it's just me venting and I don't expect anyone to read it or anything, I'm just using this space to trauma dump. Warning: strong language and a lot of uncensored swearing.

I know the topic of the golden child is often discussed here and issues with being the eldest/youngest/etc. but I just need to get this off my chest. I have a large decade+ age gap with my two older sisters. They grew up with both parents and then basically when I was born as an "oops" baby, my mom immigrated to the US with my sisters, who were at late elementary school/middle school ages. My dad stayed in our home country to take care of his parents... essentially deciding that his filial duty to his parents mattered more than the kids he chose to have, the wife he married, or any idea of family.

Because of the large age gap, my sisters have daddy issues because of how he "abandoned" them after immigration - for the first decade+ of their lives, they were a normal family living together. My daddy issues are completely different - I don't really have a relationship with my dad and I never had, because he was never there. Growing up, he would visit once a year for a couple of weeks and I was supposed to act like this guy was my dad and for most of my childhood, the deepest memories I have of him are shit like being told off that I was too loud, Americanized, not obedient enough, etc.

I never lived with my dad as a family. So imagine a stranger coming in once or sometimes twice a year, every time having screaming arguments with my mom, criticizing me and expecting me to obey him, to the point that I hated his visits. To this day (actually, today), he still says shit about how I don't make my bed every morning. Because I, a grown adult woman with a child of my own now, apparently absolutely failed at life because I don't have that habit - to which I pointed out that if he gave a #$^& as a father, he could've made me have that habit, now couldn't he? Suffice to say that I've made my peace with my lack of relationship and I don't feel the burden of filial piety toward him.

Because of the large age gap, my parents were also significantly older, both in their 40s when they had me. And they weaponize incompetence and their age like nothing else. My mom is the kind of person who would blame the computer for "not working" rather than put any effort into learning the most basic tasks, and of course she also blames everything on a language barrier even when her phone is IN CHINESE and when the people she is talking to speak Chinese. You know it's weaponized incompetence because in our home country she still pulls the same shit, somehow she is incapable of doing anything herself.

Like ok, it sucks that your husband sucks. I have sympathy for my mom being basically a single mom and raising us in a foreign country and all of that (although in the end, that's all still their generation's problems and their choices...). But at the basic core of it I also think she's just a lazy person in a lot of ways and she never should have had kids, or at least the last "oops" kid aka me, if she was going to blame and resent me for existing. And truly, she and my dad deserve each other for the misery they caused each other because they are both selfish as hell. Growing up she made me do everything under the guise of "teaching" me (aka all the housework, god forbid she had to get up and get something from another room, etc.) and everything was a guilt trip about poor her and how much I burdened her. She complained constantly about having to feed me and send me to school. I don't know how many times throughout my childhood I told her that I didn't ask to be born and if she's so unhappy that I exist, I can go kill myself.

So if you've made it this far... you already know where this is going. One of my older sisters went crazy, like seriously mentally ill, it's never going to get better, it is what it is. The other sister is the golden child. And I myself grew up worshiping the golden child because she is actually very smart, incredibly successful, ambitious, driven, etc. so it wasn't until I became an adult myself that I realized she in fact is kind of a shitty person. You know the kind of person who screams at the minimum wage worker in a store because god forbid she has to wait 20 minutes? The kind of person who speeds through a parking lot and gets pissed off when someone yells at her for almost running over their kids? The kind of person who thinks her own kids are angels but constantly badmouths the cousins' kids as spoiled and whiny when they're like 8 years old and acting like an 8 year old? The unfiltered criticism about everything and anything not to her liking or preferences, no matter how minor (my then one year old's hair was tied up in a tuft on the top of her head and that was deemed "stupid" looking and the first thing out of her mouth after like 6 months of barely talking to each other was how I was stupid to have highlights in my hair instead of keeping it black)... The inability to reflect on any of this kind of behavior in herself, being utterly convinced she is just the best and most awesome person that ever existed?

And because of the age gap, now I'm struggling in life trying to raise my young child, but my parents are physically and mentally declining. They are old, of course, because again they chose to have me at 40+ years old.

But my sister thinks I, AND MY HUSBAND, should be doing all the things my mom wants done - whether it's stupid small shit like her constant phone/ipad/whatever issues - because we are "local" aka an hour away and she is not. If my sister visits my mom and stays with her for a week, it's to do fun things like take her kids to Disneyland, and she thinks it's sooo unfair that my mom asked her to do any of this stuff when my mom should be asking me. I would like to know why she's able to scream at me about my husband being a son-in-law and she's dead silent about her own husband's absence in all of this, is he apparently not also a son-in-law?

The cherry on top is that my oldest sister, the mentally ill one, lives with my mom. As in, literally lives with her in the same house, and is totally capable of going to work, has her own iPad and phone and so on. But apparently I am supposed to pack up my toddler to spend 2 hours driving a day so I can go over and change my mom's iPad settings every time she screws them up. The iPad that is, in fact, in Chinese. Somehow my aunts and uncles of the same generation can all figure out this stuff but my mom? Absolutely not. My sister that lives there? God forbid anyone expects anything from her.

And the golden child is the sibling that maintains and truly believes that "mom could have left you in a dumpster or been a crackhead" so I endlessly owe her, no matter how ridiculous the request. I mean, I thought when she had her own kids she might have an epiphany how utterly fucked up it is to CHOOSE to bring a life into this world and then act as if you aren't at all responsible for it, and that they owe you the rest of their lives for doing the bare minimum, but go figure. I thought she might have realized that my childhood experiences are significantly different from hers. When my eldest sister came back from college, she was so mentally ill that we almost all committed suicide together (I was in 5th grade), my mom put me in my "best" clothes and we picked out rope to go to the nearby part to hang ourselves. My mom chickened out in the end but you know, at least she "asked" me if I wanted to die with them! The golden child was off in another state in medical school so we mustn't disturb her... She didn't even know half the shit I went through back then and even when I tell her now, she doesn't care.

My oldest sister to this day still blames me for how she was institutionalized for a while back then, but conveniently forgets that I was like, 10 years old and we called the police because for months she had threatened to kill me and kill herself and so on. I still know the exact spots on our white carpet that I scrubbed blood out of. But ok, can't blame her for anything because she's actually, legitimately crazy.

And that sister that I genuinely hero-worshiped for two decades growing up, that I went on and on about to everyone around me until they knew more about her than about me, is actually even worse than my mom. She turns all of her frustration with her own lack of boundaries with my mom onto me. Sure, she does so much. But that doesn't mean I have to keep doing more, no matter what kind of guilt tripping she wants to do for it.

Anyway. I know this is a really long post and I doubt anyone made it this far. I just needed to vent because this is why I no longer want to have any sort of relationship with my sister. (Edit: Also, if you asked my sister, she would 100% say that I'm the golden child and our mom spoils me and is unfair to her and so on. She's been hypocritical my entire life. We could both get the exact same slice of cake from my parents and she'll be convinced that she deserves hers, but I should've gone out to work a minimum wage job so I can pull myself up by my bootstraps enough to go by the slice of cake, otherwise I'm taking advantage of our parents and being spoiled.)

My mom is the kind of person that left me in tears driving away while pregnant because I went over to her house to help her, and she relentlessly told me how my husband was going to divorce me and leave me with nothing and could not be trusted. Keep in mind that at this point, she has known my husband for over 10 years and we have both done tons to help her. Why did she randomly fixate on this topic? Because a fucking Asian pop star was in the tabloids at the time for cheating on his wife. Let me repeat, a fucking pop star was going through some messy divorce/breakup, a guy who had absolutely nothing to do with me, my husband, or god knows what else and she would. not. shut. up. about it in relation to me.

I swear, everyone in my family has flat out broken minds and honestly despite my entire life trying hard to make sure I don't turn out the same way, I think they've broken mine too.