you sent your stepsisters an email saying “sorry you were mad you didn’t get invited to my wedding but we’re just not close enough”…
they responded with snotty email…
and you responded by saying “You didn’t even congratulate me on the wedding I didn’t invite you to!”
and you say you’re in your 30s?
How many stepsisters are there? 2, 3? so a 10 person wedding becomes a 12 or 13 person wedding. Big deal.
I think you should send them big bouquets with apology notes saying, “I’m sorry I was a loser about the wedding. I guess marriage and impending parenthood really impaired my judgement. Friends?”
I agree. I have step-siblings who I’ve never even met. I certainly couldn’t see inviting them to my wedding, especially if it meant excluding other friends or family members. Thankfully, I got married before I had step-siblings so I don’t have to worry about that.
I have a cousin who does a big all day BBQ/family get togethor every summer. His brother lives about 2 hours away, and I think that he is the closest. People come in from several (at least four I can think of off hand) _western states. His kids and grand kids crash in the house, the rest of us book motel rooms, or bring RVs.
He’s been doing this for the last 4-5 years. Not everyone can make it every year, but attendence is growing. It’s a good time.
Anyway, don’t give up if the stepsisters snub you the first time. Have a good party and the word will spread. Keep inviting them, and eventually they will get tired of choosing to be left out.
Oh, yeah, I don’t have a perfect family…the cousin who does this is divorced, some of the family has issues with his current GF, etc. There is “stuff” but somehow we all manage to get togethor and have a good time anyhow.
Wow … haven’t been in here all day … thanks for the honest responses (I think ).
My stepsisters complained to their mom and my dad about not being invited. I was honestly trying to smooth things over when I explained to them in my email how small the wedding was, and how there were a ton of people in our lives that we would have had there, if the situation was slightly different - we were NOT in a position to have a large wedding. I thought that would make them feel better, because they would realize that it’s not like we invited 100 people and not them. We invited 10 people and not them.
I was trying to make things better and inadvertently made things worse. We don’t exchange birthday cards, Christmas cards, and maybe email each other 2-3 times a year, and if one of them chose a small, very private wedding, I would NEVER have expected to be invited. I just don’t even consider them family, really.
The reason I want the situation to improve is because it makes future family gatherings tense. I don’t feel I necessarily did anything wrong. But I DO regret hurting them, that’s all.
Our wedding plans weren’t carved in stone, but as more and more time went by, and I didn’t hear a word from them, especially about the baby, yes, my feelings were very hurt. I didn’t expect gifts or anything obviously, but a message would have been nice. When that didn’t happen, I felt I had done the right thing by not inviting them, because I felt obviously they didn’t care.
As I said before, there are a lot of underlying feelings going on here, my father has preferred these girls since they came into his life, and has made it very clear and very obvious. Many of his and his wife’s friends don’t even know he has a daughter. It’s quite disgusting. No, it’s not the sisters fault, but it still prevents me from wanting them around on my ‘big day’.
I would honestly rather not have had my father OR his wife there, but my husband’s family would’ve found that strange, so I pretended it was what I wanted all along.
My family is NOT normal or healthy or very functional. I WILL consider sending each of the steps a card but I’m at the point where I feel anything I do will only make things worse.
Each time I hear you describe your father, your step-mother, or your step-sisters, I get the impression that you’re the ones keeping things cold, not them. I would hardly use the word “disgusting” to describe your tone, as you’ve described their actions, but with the tiny amount of information I have, it sure sounds like your actions are the problematic ones.
If you would “honestly rather not have your own father there,” why do you care about all this? Why do you even see him in other activities?
You can choose to be the normal, healthy, functional one. Honestly, you’re not acting that way now.
Sorry to be so harsh, but I assume when you asked for advice, you really want it.
Well, here’s the heart of it. You think dad prefers them, so you resent them. Therefore you don’t like them, really, and were probably not as apolgetic in your email as you were to your close friends who weren’t invited. Then you were willing to interpret their silence as “they don’t care anyway.” All very understandable and unlike some, I don’t blame you for it. However, I think it would help you to really think about how they are pretty much just the thing you are fighting with your dad over. Sort of like couples who argue about something silly but it is really about not feeling loved or appreciated, it just comes out as a fight about what movie to see. Heck, they may even feel, in some weird way, that if they don’t like you, they are making it more ok for your father to reject you. After all, dad’s behavior is off-base and they probably realize that. They can shift the blame for that if you are a bitch, which you obligingly have been–again, no blame. They are bitchy in return, and there you have it–dad is justified.
For all of you who wonder why this bothers me … there is a part of me that wishes I had a “normal”, happy family, where for the most part everyone got along. But I don’t. However, I certainly don’t want to make things worse and I have.
There is a family get-together next month - I’ll go, be civil & polite & nice but not gushy & fake, and then at least I’ll know that I’ve done my part to move on from this.
I can’t control how they treat me, or how they treat my husband, or how my dad and his wife react … and I need to learn to accept that.
Translation: I’ll do absolutely nothing to try and make this better.
What, you’re going to bless them with your presence; that’s the best you can do? Really what you’re saying here is “I won’t avoid a family get together. Hooray for me!”
It’s your life and your unhappy family, and you can do as you like. But honestly, I can’t understand why you don’t at least put out some effort. You started this spat, and you escalated it. Yes, they weren’t on their best behaviour either; there’s plenty of blame to go around. But at least be the better person in all this. Expend some effort.
As you said in your OP, you’re in your 30’s and this just seems so ridiculous.
Near as I can tell, you don’t really like them, but you want them to like you–you want to be a part of their family, but you don’t want them to be a part of your family. You can’t have this both ways.
You didn’t invite them to the wedding because you don’t consider them family*. Which is fine. They are going to treat you in a civil, polite way --like an aquantaince because they don’t consider you family. Which is fine. They are doing exactly* what you are doing.
Well, you could have had a happy family, maybe if you HAD made an attempt to include them in your wedding. Quite frankly, it sounds like you take your issues with your father out on them, instead of confronting Dad about it.
Next time you get married (just kidding…) invite everyone. My father explained something to my sister before her wedding (when there were fights about who to invite to where, allowing/disallowing children to attend, etc.): Weddings are about family. It is not just a bond between the two people getting married. Those two people are creating a family of their own, and each is bringing the other into their family.
My advice to others out there: Structure your ceremony, reception, etc. as you would like it to be, but for God’s sake, invite everyone in your family. And if money is a factor (as it often is), then sacrifice glitz in favor of inviting more people.
It’s just one day. The two of you can do whatever just the two of you want to do when you leave for your honeymoon.
And sorry to be another scolding voice, but I think Guin and Manda Jo are right on.
Do you want them to be part of your family and involved in your life? It doesn’t sound like it. It sounds more like you just don’t want them to sour your relationship with the rest of your family. That’s a tough surgical strike there.
If you REALLY want them to be part of the family, then go beg their forgiveness. And I mean beg. Don’t ask for their understanding. Don’t say that it was a small ceremony and that there were extenuating circumstances. Take the blame. Beg. Say, “I’m sorry I was such a dumbass. I never meant to hurt your feelings, but I was so stupid that I didn’t even think about how you would feel. I’ve been really selfish, but I would like to ask you to forgive me. I know I haven’t been the best sibling to you. But I honestly would like that to change. I want to have my sisters in my life. I understand that you might not be able to forgive me for what I did, but, at the least, I beg you not to take out my stupidity on your niece/nephew when s/he arrives. I want her/him to know her/his aunts.”
That’s right; the Stainz’s family dysfunctionality stems entirely from her thoughtless, or is it deliberate, exclusion of barely-related family.
:rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes: :rolleyes:
Stainz, I feel for you, even if you do seem to be of two minds on the subject of your family. Were I to get married again, I’d never even consider inviting my father’s wife (and therefore, most likely, my father) to the ceremony; this is, after all, the woman that threw a screaming, profane, stomping on the ground fit that you would’t accept from a three-year-old at my paternal grandmother’s graveside service, all because things weren’t going her way. And on top of it, she expects me to apologize for offending her, a position my father tacitly backs up. (“Gee, son, can’t you just…say you’re sorry. You know, just to smooth things over?”) This is also the woman who has repeatedly accused me of physically assaulting her, even though she would regularly body-check and scream at me in the short time I lived with them, which is another thing I’m to apologize for.
The long and short of it is, if your situation is anything like mine, there is no amount of conciliation that will satisfy the perpetrators and satiate their need for drama. And there is probably nothing that you can do to make your family less dysfunctional and happy, regardless of what someone else might claim. “Happy” families are the product of good teamwork and parenting, where everyone is included, not owing to obligation but because their presence is a positive and constructive (if, perhaps, occasionally quirky or irritating) influence.
It seems, judging by your reluctance to invite your father and his wife, and your decision not to include your step-siblings, that you have recognized the negative impact they have on your life and have taken what measures you could to reduce their involvement. There’s nothing wrong with that, but naturally they are going to take such measures as an attempt to keep them at arms length and respond in kind, or if they are of the more dramatic flair, exaggerate their response by ignoring you completely. Save for playing into their petty game and accepting complete responsibility for the sitaution (as some posters have advised), there is no way you are going to “improve” the relationship…nor is it clear that it would be of any benefit to you if you did.
I, too, wish I had a better relationship with family, but that would require a family with which a better relationship could exist. For me to have a relationship with my father would require that I accept the same kind of abuse and offensive behavior from his wife that she heaves at him (and that he accepts without comment). I’ve been there, and it is what led me to leave home while still in high school.
If your step-siblings–whom you describe as not having a close relationship to you–cannot accept the quite reasonable and valid (despite what others have argued) decision to keep the ceremony small and open only to intimate friends (and assuming that this argument is true for both sides of the party) then that is their problem. You can, of course, apologize for not realizing that they expected to be invited, and tender the offer to be more involved in your future family goings-on as a means of developing a closer relationship (if that is what you so desire) but I would not suggest as going so far as to apologize for making a decision regarding your close relationships, your schedule, and (presumably) your money, that materially affected them not one whit. They’re going to continue being in a snit about it, and the response of not having sent a card for your upcoming birth serves only to justify their response. The appropriate thing to do, after explaining the circumstances involving the planning of your wedding, is to drop the matter and let them make of it what they may. I feel certain that Judith Martin would offer a concurring opinion on that subject.
As a side note, I find myself perplexed at the claims at others that the wedding is not for, not to be planned by, and not for the celebration of the principals in question. There seems to have arisen, concomitant with the emergence of the middle-class wedding industry, the notion that weddings much include and highlight everyone with which not only the bride and groom come into regular contact, but indeed the business partners, golf buddies, and financial advisors of the parents and extended family. It is one thing, perhaps, in the case of a proud father who is paying for the wedding and, with the concurrance of the bride and groom, to invite friends and acquaintances as a show of his success and wealth (I find such a display egregiously obnoxious, at best, but it does harken back to the days when such a union was a community celebration), but it is quite another for people to demand, and response with petulance if they are not, to be invited to a ceremony that is paid for and held by the couple in question, even given the tenuous familial connection as step-sibblings or second cousins, and to take such a rejection as, has been described by previous posters, as a deliberate and directed snub. Such people need to find friends of their own whom they can annoy with their irritating comportment.
But they aren’t playing a “petty game”–they didn’t complain to the OP, they complained to a third party, who had to run and tell tales. Compaining to a third party is SOP when you feel snubbed but know you oughten really care. If anyone is playing games, it’s that third party who had to stir the pot. Only when confronted by the OP did the situation escalate.
This seems to be what happened:
The OP says "Y’all ate just some girls I know, not family (a position I hold towards some of my own full siblings: nothing wrong with this attitude.)
The sisters say back “OK then, we’re cool with that. We’ll be civil”
OP wants to know how to fix the problem, excpet there it there doesn’t seem to be one. Everyone is in agreement: there is no family here.
The issue I have with Stainz is that she seems to feel that the sisters’s attitude is somehow ungracious, while her own is reasonable, even though, near as I can tell, all the parties involved feel exactly the same way about each other.
If you can explain, Stainz how they way they feel about you and plan to behave towards you is different from how you feel about them and behave towards them–polite and distant–it would be appriciated. Because I don’t understand it thus far.
Well, I’d agree with the above statements; certainly, Stainz is in no position to expect or demand respect or praise from her step-siblings, and if there is a complaint to be made about her behavior, there it is. (And your observation regarding the person responsible for stirring the pot is insightful; perhaps, another indication of why the OP was initially reluctant to include that individual, much less the accompanying chorus, into the wedding ceremony.)
But, in fact, many poster seem to be in disagreement with the bolded statement above; they are admonishing her for “deliberately snubbing” the step-sisters by not inviting them to the ceremony (despite indicating that it was kept very small owing to financial limitations and the desire to keep the party intimate) and extolling imploring her to “beg” her way back to forgiveness when there is, in my estimation, nothing to beg or apologize for, other than unintentionally offending the sensibilities of individuals who had no reason, save for the widely accepted but falicious social expectation that participants of a wedding must invite all would-be comers regardless of the degree of past association. The step-sisters, and indeed, the step-mother, do not qualify as “family” in the sense of “people with whom we wish to share this emotional and developmental milestone in our lives with” from the point of view of the bridal party.
Insisting, as many here are, that a legal, or indeed, even biological relationship somehow obligates the party in question to accept, respect, and accomodate all who fit within those parameters as being inherently and necessarily worthy of sharing in the principal’s most cherished celebrations belies an ignorance, or perhaps unwillingness, to acknowledge the fact that many who fall under the legalistic definition of family are not, in fact, people with whom you’d care to share a cab ride, much less a personal and (hopefully) joyous celebration.
Furthermore, it is not, as asserted by many here and elsewhere, the case that a wedding is for everybody but the bride and groom (or bride and bride, or groom and groom, or whatever other permutations someone cares to create). The principals may choose to include whomever they wish as befits the extend to which they wish to broadcast their union “to the world”, and a failure to include one person or another should not be subject to the false diachotomy of otherwise being intentionally excluded, but merely that the guest list is limited, as all must be, to a certain number of people with whom the bride and groom think would most appreciate and best complement the celebration. The notion that the wedding, especially when financed by the bride and groom alone, as is the implied case in the OP, is predicated on the wishes and desires of the attendees is the stuff that “weddings from hell” are made of. Even in the case, as is traditional, where the father of the bride pays for the wedding, the payment is an endowment, albeit one that understandibly has certain expectations attached to it with regard to who is invited and how the wedding is conducted, but hopefully not to the extend of being a hubris for the sublimated frustrations of the bride-mother or a battle ground between two warring factions for control over the ceremonies.
The mistake, or rather mistakes, made by Stainz, can, IMHO, be summed up in two simple categories. First, in expecting some kind of enthusiasm or concern by members of her non-family for which she has no affection and with whom she has made tacit efforts to avoid having regular contact; and second, in responding “in kind”, or indeed at all, to the snippy insistance by said non-siblings to their unwarrented expectation of being included in the private doings of the immedate Stainz coupling. Additionally, it can be observed that the step-mother in this case has herself made no apparent effort to smooth things over or give prior notice of the anticipation that the step-siblings be included, yet feels it necessary to “stir the pot” after events have unfolded in a way that has resulted, whether justified or not, in feelings being bruised.
Having grown up in such a household, or actually, a couple of them, I can fully understand Stainz’s unwillingness to desire more frequent and intimate contact with the supposed family; and being often beleagured by people who for some reason feel it necessary to express to me that I should make all efforts to make peace with my family, whatever the cost to me, I can understand why, regardless of reservations, she feels it necessary to extend some kind of tenative and circumspect relations with the not-family; that the result is a mild paradox not unlike wanting to own a cat while being allergic to cat-fur is justifably illustrated, but the insistance that she should just suck it up and chew on a furball regardless of her inflamed sinuses is hardly the solution.
Or again, as Mandy JO so sagaciously pointed out, this is not a family, and this conclusion is not the result of the sitaution outlined, as suggested by Guinastasia, but a result of it. This is the point and the object lesson which Stainz should take away from this discussion.
in my case, the shoe was on the other foot. my mother had left my father and i shortly after my birth, and when i was 15 my father had a serious stroke and was unable to care for me from that point on until his death. my aunt and uncle were surrogate parents to me, and i love them dearly. i thought of their three sons as my brothers, not cousins.
several years ago, one cousin was getting married. since i had recently moved, i assumed my invitation had not been forwarded, and called to inquire. that’s when i was told the wedding was for “immediate family” only, i cried for four days straight.
in all my 45 years, i had never thought of any of them as anything less than my immediate family, and was shocked and deeply hurt to find that i was not considered theirs.
maybe your stepsisters felt the same way.
am i civil to everyone? absolutely, but i no longer send cards and gifts, nor do i proudly display everyones photos as family photos in my home.
i don’t view my actions as playing a petty game. i simply do not have the relationship with any of these people that i thought i had, and have made appropriate adjustments in my life to reflect what my actual relationship is with these people: distant.
perhaps that is what your stepsisters are now doing with you.
I think that the reason you are seeing this reaction is that Stainz came in here and asked how to reesasblish family relations with these people. I think that many posters are basically saying “Well, if you want them to be family, you have to treat them like family. And not inviting family to your wedding is rude.” You and I are coming at this from the opposite side: We are saying “why treat them like family? You’ve no obligation, let it go.” Either way, I think that everyone is in agreement about what needs to happen: Stainz needs to decide what sort of relationship she wants to have, and base her actions on that free choice. Before she’s made that choice, she can’t really decide on a course of action.
I agree, except that I would say that the not-sisters had every right to bitch to their mom about not being invited: private bitching about feeling excluded is as ancient a wedding tradition as any other. Their mom ought not to have passed the word, and once she did, Stainz ought to have ignored it. Their feeling were hurt; they felt rejected; they vented in private and moved on. Nothing “snippy” happened until Stainz confronted them: you can’t tell people they shouldn’t have hurt feelings, because we are all entitled to hurt feelings. All you can do is insist people ACT like civil adults, which the women in question were already doing before Stainz did anything.
I didn’t meant to imply it was entirely her fault. However, it’s a two-way street-she expects them to fawn and be eager to congratulate her after she snubs them and says, “Well, I really don’t consider them family.”
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