I'll start this by saying that I don't want to criticise anyone here. I just feel a bit sad about the situation and I don't feel like it will get any better - so it would be good to know what others would do.
My family is small and there aren't any children, (they were wanted but didn't happen). I have one sister and we are both adopted (different birth parents) and a younger half brother (our adoptive dad remarried after splitting with our adoptive mum after 24 years).
I don't actually use the prefixes of " adoptive" or "step" in day to day life - they are the only family I have ever known.
My relationship with my sister has always been a bit marred by our mum's behaviour, which I grew up thinking was odd but have only in recent years (probably around age 40 ish) identified it as being caused by narcissistic parenting (triangulation) which meant that my sister (nearly 4 years older) was the "golden child" and I was the "problem child". I always knew that something was off but after years of gaslighting, I finally worked out what was going on - and in recent years, I have learned how to grey rock and not give the reactions that would feed this behaviour. It's sad but it's necessary. This thread isn't about my mum though.
I won't bore you as to why, but I have ended up living in one part of the UK within about half an hour's drive of our mum and my sister has ended up in another part of the UK, a similar distance from our dad. The two areas are about 300 miles apart, so it isn't easy for us to regularly see the further away parent. I stay close to our dad on the phone (we chat every weekend for at least an hour and I make sure I make that time for him, however busy I am). I don't have a car at the moment but I make sure that I get down to see him at least a couple of times a year. I am at his (and his wife and my brother's) at the moment.
My sister hasn't been to visit our mum for 5 years, either alone or with her husband. She does drive and has a considerably higher wage than I do. She expects our almost 80 year old mum to travel down to see them if she wants to spend time with her. Our mum is very capable still and a confident driver etc (we don't see her as elderly at all) but I still worry when she's doing a minimum 5 hour drive down every few months.
She phones our dad perhaps every 3-4 weeks, when she wants to tell him something about herself. She visits them maybe once every 4-6 weeks, so they hardly see her - and our little brother doesn't get that time with one of his sisters. He has his own challenges and it makes me really sad because I would kill to see more of them.
Despite all of this, our parents won't say a word to her about it. My sister and her husband visited for lunch today as I'm visiting - yet my sister asked me one question in the entire 4 hours she was here, which was whether I had a good journey. She spent the entire time talking about herself and a job interview she has coming up - which is the first job she has applied for since she was let go from her previous job with a settlement agreement because they hated her.
She knows I've had a shit time recently in my own life and she asked me absolutely nothing. My dad has his blinkers on and wants to be "fair" (I get it to a point and would never challenge him but it's frustrating). His wife (I don't call her my stepmum as they married when I was 20!) gets it completely and when my sister and BIL left, she asked me if I was ok - and knew I wasn't. She said she had been sitting there waiting and watching to see if my sister asked me anything and hadn't even heard the journey question! I realise typing this that it might sound petty and perhaps that's what I'm being.
My sister wasn't always so selfish - it's like something has shifted in her over the past 10 years or so and I feel like she is enabled to be the way that she is. I'm the unselfish one who would bend over backwards for any of them but she will always be the one who is put on a pedestal by our mum - and spoken about "fairly" by our dad.
This is a bit of a crap example but we were raised to always take something to someone's house if we are being hosted. It doesn't matter if it's our parents; if we are invited for a meal or are staying over, we would take a token of thanks (choccies, wine, flowers). That wasn't because our parents expected it - it was just the manners we were brought up with. Until about 2 years ago, my sister would always arrive at our dad's with a bottle (or two) of wine, as we do tend to get stuck in when we all get together. Then it just stopped - she went from years and years of us both reliably turning up with an offering, to them just turning up empty handed. I just think it's so rude- and for a while, despite being on a much lower amount of money, I would buy two bottles just so that our dad wasn't paying out on our afternoon wine consumption!
She turned up today, empty handed. When our dad asked what she'd like as a pre-lunch drink she said she would like white wine but then said she would like red with her meal. I bit my tongue and didn't ask what colour she had brought with her!
After lunch, I broached the topic of whether she was planning to come up to visit us (that's when we worked out that she hadn't been up for 5 years). She missed our Mum's 70th birthday as she didn't come up and now I'm thinking about her 80th birthday and thinking surely the same thing can't happen again.
Despite all of this, she is still the golden child. I have no idea how I ended up in this situation.
Sorry for this being such a long ramble. I love them all - but I don't like my sister. I don't like the person she has become. I don't like that she hurts my dad, ignores my brother, doesn't ask me any questions and expects our mum to visit her. I haven't got it in me to suddenly try to emluate her behaviour in the hope that it will make me more popular because I care too much. Has anyone else worked out how to navigate this kind of behaviour from a sibling, without pissing anyone off?