I try not to let it, but I feel a bit flat that my parents show a preference to my sister. We are both in our 20s, she is several years older. We both have our own homes at opposite ends of the city with my parents in our family home somewhere in the middle.
My sister has always been social and outgoing, she is really good at hosting people and as such will regularly cook nice meals for my parents or persuade them to go round to see her and walk her dog. I don’t have a problem with this at all but when I have tried a similar offer of making dinner for them, it’s more often than not declined.
I don’t get on with my sister and I’ve made peace with that, though I wish it was different. We are different personalities and see the world differently. She very much likes the conversation on her at all times. I’m regularly called boring because I don’t overly like drinking. She is hostile towards my partner and in conversation pretends he doesn’t exist, will ignore him when he speaks to her and doesn’t think his job is good enough, he works really hard and we are still only young and at the beginning of our careers. I am generally just treated as if I am below her and know nothing so I take a step back, or try to. She will sing my praises in front of my mum, and cry to her that I don’t want anything to do with her, yet she chose to block me on social media. If I politely mention anything that doesn’t sit right, everything gets very inflammatory and reactive and it’s me who is looking for trouble. Tiring dynamic and boundaries obviously needed, I made a decision and tried putting them in.
My dad stays firmly out of it and in the middle but my mum is very swayed by my sister and genuinely believes her narrative and every opinion she has, which is that I hate her / am jealous of her. DM has said some hurtful things to me over it, clearly does not want to ever address my sister’s behaviour. She rang me to tell me how upset she feels that her daughters don’t get on, she doesn’t recognise me anymore and has mentioned that my sister’s mental health isn’t great and that’s why she has acted as she had - if I knew her better and wanted anything to do with her, I’d know that. When I observed that it’s not a defence my mum said ‘you’ll have no family’ which made me very upset, so my partner gestured for me to pass him the phone and politely told my mum that he would not share his view on things but hated seeing me upset and cut the conversation short.
DM then sent DP a message asking him to not ‘control’ her communication with me. This upset him as he was trying to look out for me and I was too upset to continue the conversation on the phone at the time. We have since been to see them but not mentioned this exchange, it’s a bit of an elephant in the room. She has not apologised to me. All I’ve tried to do is set a boundary with my sister and from speaking to friends, they do not understand why DM even needs to be involved.
I just feel a bit down as we were hoping to move 10/15 miles away but chose this house in this area a few months ago to be near to my family and move away from my partner’s, and they don’t come round nor make much of an effort to do anything with me/us. It’s just rubbish as I would love to get on with them better but they don’t seem to try to. Has anyone experienced anything similar? I would try and suggest more things to do but I feel a bit silly if all of it is coming from me… I read a similar post the other day and came to the conclusion it can’t be one sided but I am a bit stuck on how to approach things going forward!