Dopers, who were half siblings. Did you feel like this?

In My Humble Opinion
1

An very dear friend of mine told me this. Her parents split up when she was little and her mother remarried, and had three children with her new partner. She spent most of her time either with mum, or travelling to see her father. She often said that she felt…uncomfortable with mum and her family, almost as if they wished that she had not existed. Not directly, but she says that the underlying issue was always there. Her relationship with her half siblings was/is coordial, but not close.

Anyone else who felt this way?

2

I have the same story but not the same feelings. I never felt resented for being the one child not a result of the current marriage. My younger brother and sister are just regular siblings to me. My stepfather did not treat me badly or anything, and did the best he could to relate to me. My relationship with him was not the same quality that he has with my siblings, but my relationship with my mother was unchanged.

3

No. I am technically an only child, because my mother and father didn’t have any other kids. However, my mom remarried, and had two kids with my first stepdad and one kid with my second stepdad. I consider all three of them my siblings and refer to them that way. I never, ever say “My half-sister” or “my half-brother”. It’s my sister and my brothers, always.

4

My two older siblings from my mother’s first marriage are my brother and sister. I don’t even think of them as “half-siblings”. My dad adopted them shortly after my parents married, we were raised in the same household (although there is a large age gap), and there was AFAICT no difference between them & us youngers. (They might have felt differently, however, I can’t answer to that.)

My three older siblings from my dad’s first marriage are more like aunts & uncles - the youngest had started college when I was born. There was never any really close relationship built with them. I sometimes refer to them as “half” siblings, when it seems appropriate to explain the more distant relationship with them.

5

Great, now I have “The Brady Bunch Theme” as an earworm.

6

No, not really. But then I was already an adult living on my own when my dad and stepmum got married, and my sister was born well after that. There’s 20.75 years between my little sister and me, but she’s always been and always will be my sister.

7

My mother had me and basically threw me away, and right around the time I found out, she had two kids with another man. Yes, it hurt, it hurt so damn much. You could take care of them and not me?

Now that I am older I know there were seriously extenuating circumstances but I don’t think I’ll ever forgive her. It helps that she doesn’t think she’s done anything wrong.

My relationship with my half-siblings? There isn’t one. One of them thinks I am a total jerk, and I think he is a total jerk. I could love the other one, but he is attached to both our mom and his jerky brother so I stay away.

8

My father remarried and had two daughters when I was in my teens. I was close to my Dad, and though I didn’t live with him, I did spend most weekends at his house. He died suddenly a few years after remarrying. I was never particularly close to my step mother (I suspect she resented his first family) or my half sisters and lost touch with them when she remarried.

My half sister has attempted to contact me. I have no interest in a relationship with her. She can blame her mother for that.

9

I have a half-sister who is considerably younger than I am. I can’t stand her mom but I’ve never resented my sister for it. Maybe it would be different if she’d been born when I was younger but by the time she came along I was old enough to know that the whole situation wasn’t her fault.

10

My half-brother and two half-sisters are 14, 16, and 17 years older than I am, and I grew up with a full older brother and younger brother. We use the half-sibling designation at family gatherings just to help others keep everything straight. It got so complicated with one family member that I finally said, “we’re not related, but we’re family,” which he completely agreed with.

Visits by my half-sibs when I was growing up were The Coolest Thing Ever. All three have always treated my brothers and I well, though there was often more of a young aunt/uncle vibe from them than older sibling vibe.

I know that my half-sibs have issues with our father, and I can’t blame them. Dad is a good man, but he has been completely tone deaf to the dynamics of our mixed/blended/step/not-related-but-still-family family. Their mom remarried shortly after the divorce, and Dad was out of the picture for some time. Their step-father raised them and was in their lives even after he and their mom divorced.

While Dad always paid child support on time, he wasn’t very active in their lives. If called, he came to help, but he never seemed to get that he was not their primary father. Their step-dad was. As my brothers and I became adults, it became very clear that Dad wanted to be treated as pater familias by all his offspring, not just the three he raised. Never mind the step-father that raised them, my oldest sister’s in-laws who practically adopted the entire clan on that side, their mom’s third husband, or any of the assorted uncles, friends of parents, and parents of friends who filled the role of Dad while ours was hundreds of miles away raising another group of kids. When that doesn’t happen, Dad gets his feelings hurt and withdraws from all of us.

It’s heartbreaking, some times. My three older sibs are all good people. I like them very much. I adore and love my oldest sister and have gone to her for support and advice on many an occasion. I know they resent Dad’s attitude, though they have never publicly disrespected him, and I don’t believe any of them would ever purposefully allow their negative feelings to spill over onto me, my brothers, or our mom. Yet, there is a distance there, and it’s especially tangible now that I live so close to them.

I know they love Dad. I know they like and respect my mom (she’s championed their mom to Dad on more than one occasion), and I know they care about me and my brothers. I know if I phoned any of them and asked for help, I would get it without question. Yet, there are times when there is very much a divide between ‘this side’ of the family and ‘that side’, and I wonder how we will do once Dad is gone.

11

My dad has two daughters from his previous marriage.

There are about 30 years of age difference between me and them. A lot of drama surrounds that part of my family. I’ve grown to feel closer to one of them than the other over the years, but there’s still definitely a lack of close familial connection. They barely knew him growing up; I’ve always had him around. Part of me suspects he never got over not being able to raise them, due to a complex set of circumstances.

It’s probably one of the strangest things about my family. It doesn’t really bother me, but makes for interesting explanations when people ask if I’m an only child.

“Well…kinda…”

12

My older brothers are both half-brothers (10 years and 7 years older than me) and my little sister is also a half (14 years younger than me). We all share the same mother. I’m the product of my mom’s second marriage but my dad pretty much raised my older brothers as his own. In fact, when my parents divorced, my older brothers (along with me and my adopted older sister) stayed with my dad - despite the fact that at that point my dad wasn’t even related to them by marriage anymore. We’ve always been a family and there has never been a time when I’ve felt that anyone wasn’t welcome. I love all my siblings as full siblings regardless of our relation.

13

I have a nine year older half-brother. He grew up with his mom, I grew up with my mom and our dad. We’re friendly, but we didn’t really grow up together, so we’re not that close. I’m closer to my sister that I grew up with (even though. . .well, jury’s out on whether she might actually be a half-sister. My family is fun. But that uncertainty only came to light when I was in my twenties, so, yanno, it doesn’t really register).

I also get pissed off at my sister more than my half-brother. Familiarity breeds bitchiness.

14

My dad has two sons from a previous marriage and my mom has two daughters. Then they got together and had me, and they knew it was much more than a hunch- Right, where was I? Anyway, despite the fact that my brothers lived with their mom, and we were only all together every other weekend, we’re a pretty closed knit group. The “step” and “half” qualifiers only come out when we explain in depth about our family to someone else.

What is awkward is when I’m around my sisters’ other family. Their dad remarried and had kids, so they have another half-brother and two half-sisters. It’s weird to think about my sisters having these other siblings that I have absolutely no relation to. But I generally only see them around weddings and such.

15

Yeah, my older brothers also have another brother and sister on their father’s side. It’s also kind of weird to me.

16

I have three half-sisters. None of us have the same set of parents, but I consider all of them to be fully my sisters.

My step-brother and step-sister, however, were teens when I was born, so I had little to do with them and they’re basically strangers.

17

Background: My folks divorced when I was seven (about 1974). Both remarried in the late 70s/early 80s. I did a lot of east coast to west coast travel then. Mom was in DC and dad was in LA. Woot. 500,000 air miles before majority.

Dad’s new wife is 20 years younger than he is. It’s pretty clear that she’s always been uncomfortable with him having been married previously she’s tried to hide it. But she hits the wine pretty hard the few times my mom has visited and came up with an excuse not to attend my wedding because my mom would be there. No worries and I can understand.

They have three boys, the twins and a younger boy. We’ve never lived together but we’re friendly and I’ve helped them where I can. They’re 28 and 23 now and call me for advice when they need someone not in his 70s. I helped one get an internship and another deal with dad’s disapproval of his engagement to an older woman. It works.

My mom (now on marriage three) had a second marriage and there’s a younger sister from that. I spent a deal of time living with her and helping to raise her. We lived together for only about 3-4 years but she’s pretty cool. I took her and her friends to all ages shows at the 9:30 club in DC and introduced her to musicians I knew. She and I still get along great. She’s in Chicage getting her masters and calls when she needs help and when we’re in Chicago we’re inseparable.

So no, not a lot of tension with the younger siblings. There is a LOT of distance in years between us, though. 16-20 years is enough time to be a whole generation, practically.

18

I don’t have any half-siblings; I know people with half-siblings where the first marriage dissolved in divorce and where it was a death, and also one case where the eldest’s biodad had declined to man up when his gf got pregnant.

There seems to be a general link between how ugly the original situation was and how well the kids manage the new situation. Those whose widowed parents remarried will beat up anybody who says “oh, but then you’re not really brothers!” (even in the case in which some of the siblings are completely unrelated biologically); those whose parents’ ugly divorce would have given a culebrón material for a couple of seasons were much worse off. I’ve heard some of these say things like “sometimes I think, if I hadn’t been on the way they wouldn’t have been married, and Mom wouldn’t have suffered so much… then I look at my sisters and I can’t regret that they are here” (ugh, if you ask me); “well, since the judge saw fit to send me with Dad, I saw fit to make sure Dad knew how much I despise his cheating ass” and “my [new] sibs are ok, but every time I look at Dad or at her, I want to throw up :mad:”

19

My dad has been married five times. I often heard unhappy comments from my older sister (now estranged) about how much better he treated his ‘new’ family.

My dad was married twice, then married my mom, divorced her, and married again. I always felt like the unwanted child – his new wife had two perfect-looking boys and they had a nice house and cars and wonderful clothes and things. My own mother was poor. I was the dirty scrappy stepdaughter.

Then they divorced after 8 years and I had my dad to myself for the first time in my life…for a few months. Then he moved in with his new girlfriend. She had no children. It was all good. My son was born, we were a quirky little group, the four of us.

They divorced.

Now he has a new lady. She’s my age (well, older by 4 years) and just had a baby. HIS baby. Everything in his life is about the new family. Thanksgiving is with her family, he moved from Iowa to CA, bought her a house, buys the new baby every single thing on the market, etc.

I’m only twenty-six years old and I’ve sat through four family photos now…with four different ‘moms’. It’s weird to think there were yet two others before mine!

My mom was a little bit the same - when she got remarried, everything was about the ‘new’. And then she divorced. My half-brother is the sweetest thing in the world and I adore him, but there is a definitely a feeling of, This is mom’s new life when I walk into her house. Her job, parenting, attitude, rules, etc., are all dramatically different for the littlest one.

I guess some people think of remarriage as ‘restart’…that can cause issues.

20

My brothers are eight and nine years older than me, from my mom’s first marriage. I never think of them as my half brothers unless I’m reminded. I idolised my eldest brother as a child and he didn’t act like I was too much of a bother, which I appreciated. We still get along great. My younger brother…not so much :stuck_out_tongue:

I don’t know whether they thought we didn’t want them around. I think it would have been difficult for them to think that when I was constantly following them around worshipfully! :slight_smile: