u/ComtesseCrumpet

About a decade ago, I moved overseas with my husband and after a few years of living in our new country we had our first and only child. On his first birthday, we decided to travel back home and have his birthday party there so that we could visit with family that we hadn’t seen in years and introduce him to his extended family.

Before the move, I’d had some rocky relationships with my family as we’d all grown up in an abusive environment and don’t have the healthiest ways of relating. I have four siblings the oldest is a brother, two older sisters and one younger sister.

In my family, picking out the “weakest” sibling, gossiping viciously behind their back and subtly excluding them is what happens. My eldest sister was the most frequent target as she had been in a car accident which left her with a TBI and unable to work. She’d also gained weight. So, she wasn’t worthy of the intelligent, attractive, successful siblings anymore.

Long ago, I’d decided I didn’t like this dynamic and would leave when it started but knew that I was probably a target as well. My mother, who had died years ago, had scapegoated and severely abused me as a child. She abused the others as well but was hardest on me and recruited the second oldest sister in her abuse of me.

In my trauma from the abuse, I acted like, well, a traumatized person and my mother spread amongst the family in her dying letter that something was wrong with me and I would need “extra help”. Now among nice, normal siblings this might have been met with kindness and understanding. But, this was seen as weakness and I joined the defective sister with the TBI, except it was worse as this was viewed as a moral failing. The sister that was recruited to help mother with the abuse was especially vicious in spreading rumors about me and trying to ruin my relationships in the family.

So, this rather long background leads to the party. I’d been gone for some years by that point and had some therapy under my belt to deal with my trauma. I hadn’t seen my siblings in years and the family dynamics were already becoming a bit fuzzy to me. I naively felt that I had grown and changed, and perhaps even thought my “weaker” self somehow deserved that treatment, and this stronger version did not. So, they would see how strong I was and treat me better. Of course, you all know, they did not.

I rented a house on a lake for the weekend for everyone to stay in and we agreed to “play it by ear” for the plans outside of the party day. We had the lake to enjoy and in the past had played board games and caught up. I figured we might go into town for dinner or something like we’d always done. Instead, my sisters and brother took it upon themselves to make plans behind my back to go hiking all day. In the morning, on the only full day we had to hang out before the party, they informed me of their plans and told me I couldn’t go because it wasn’t kid friendly. I stood there in shock as they all walked out leaving me with the other sister they also liked to exclude.

At first I started to cry with all the old worthless feelings resurfacing but then I got mad. I sent a text laying out how shitty that was to exclude me when they were doing something they could do anytime, I had just travelled from overseas and rented this house and they had planned it all behind my back. They came back and only the youngest apologized saying she knew I was upset and the rest sulked in their rooms for the rest of the day.

I decided to make the best of it and get through the weekend. I was reminiscing with my youngest sister about some funny but gross stuff that my mother used to do when second oldest sister went off on me for never letting her have “good memories” of my abusive mom. I was like, “the one that left 200 welts on my body. The one that strangled me? What good memories should I talk about?” She had the nerve to seriously say, that, yes, I should be talking about good memories completely dismissing what I went through not to mention her part in it.

Later I walked up behind my niece, who is about 18 and was the sweetest child, and she was saying, “I’m so sick of babies.” I said, “What?” and she startled and said, “Oh, not him“, looked at my son, “other babies”. I just knew she was lying by the way she was acting. I know some people don’t like kids but she’d only been there a day and the only time he’d even hinted at crying I’d taken him to my room and quickly settled him for bed. I watched him the whole time. No one else. So, it seemed like she’d picked up on the family habit of shitting on me and it was rolling down to my son. That broke my heart. I’d always been kind to her and read her books as a child.

During the party, my husband‘s family drove up because they live close and helped set-up. My family mainly clumped together and kept to themselves while watching everyone else and gossiping about his family. They didn‘t try to hang out with me at all when I was running around busy and I felt isolated but his family was great that day.

Anyway, after all this went down, I decided I was done and eventually cut them all off. I don’t want my son to grow up seeing his mother treated like that- being excluded, and talked about behind my back. I don’t want them to start the same treatment toward him. My oldest sister, the one with the TBI, is sad about that and tells me it wasn’t that bad. Sometimes she gets me doubting myself. She says I should just talk to them again so we can all see each other again. But I just can’t get over the fact that I always leave sad and upset or in tears over the things they do. So, AITAH?

I’ve made a few posts around Reddit about this subject but I just want to discuss it with like-minded people. When we talk about women‘s rights I see us expressing that we don’t want our rights “taken away” or the idea that they were “given” to us by men and it’s always niggled at me because that means our rights aren‘t inherent to us. Don’t get me wrong, I’ve used the same language myself. When we frame it like this I think we’re doing ourselves a disservice. I notice that misogynistic men seem to be really hung-up on the idea that they gave us our rights because that gives them power over us. So here’s where I‘m at:

I believe our rights are inherent and can’t be given or taken away, only suppressed. We need to stop thinking of them as something that men gave us because they did not. Nor are they something we took from them. They are something we forced them to recognize just as they recognize their own.

They never question where their own rights come from or if they do they assume they are god-given or inherent to themselves as humans. Perhaps they believe they are granted by government, but even by that view, their rights are no more superior than my own. Many of them will just argue that might makes right and that their ability to suppress makes them the granter of rights but it only makes them an oppressor. It doesn’t take anything from me but suppresses what is already there. Whatever perspective they take, I view my rights as valid or inherent as theirs.

There’s this expectation that women should be grateful towards our oppressors for deigning to give us rights when we were the ones that fought so hard to end our oppression. They do not get credit for our victories. I’ve had men get angry at me for pointing this stuff out and question what I will do when they take my rights away as if they’re not already trying to do that. My answer is always to fight and protest like I do now. 

I’d like to see us start talking and thinking about our rights as something that is part of us and not something that can be given or taken from us, only suppressed. We give men too much power and credit we view them any other way.