Somedays I really dislike my sister

The BBQ Pit
1

Okay, so I’ve been lurking a while and it’s probably weird to sign up just to bitch about my little sister, but I need to rant to someone not involved and with it being winter vacation non of my friends are readily available. Sorry.

So, background info now. In June my little sister had a baby. He’s adorable, and I love both of them, but my sister just doesn’t seem to be ready for a kid. Most of the care of him is done by my parents and myself. I can understand us watching him while she’s at work, but when she finishes work she drives straight to her friends’ houses and hangs out with them until she comes home at 6 am and then passes out until it’s time for work again. Like I said, she’s young and I don’t really mind helping with my nephew, to a point.

Now, we also have, well had now, animals. Dogs and cats. These animals and the baby loved each other. The nephew and the cats would just lie beside each other happily when I was watching him. He’s both safe and happy with him and they were so adorable together. I have a picture of the nephew and one of the cats that’s my absolute favorite.

My sister, however, has never liked the animals. What’s she’s doing now is pissing me off. She has blackmailed my family that if we didn’t get rid of them she was going to my nephew’s fathers house (who, by the way, is in jail right now) and not bringing the baby around us anymore. My sister doesn’t even like staying there very much and they have a dog too, but she’s seriously doing this to us. I know a lot of people might say they’re just animals, pets, and it shouldn’t matter that much to us, but these animals are our family. One of the dogs has her birthday today, she’d be seven. My sister has the entire rest of the family in tears about this and she doesn’t care at all. I just don’t understand how she can depend on us so much with her kid and then be too much of a selfish bitch to not give a damn about breaking our hearts like this. I mean fuck, why is she being so manipulative? I just don’t get it at all.

I am so angry, sad, and every other possible way of being upset that I’m shaking and can’t even express it. Thanks for listening, well, reading, though. Sorry if I’m messing up on protocol here.

2

Wow. Sounds like the whole family needs to sit down and talk this whole thing out. Your sister sounds like a piece of work, I’m sorry to say.

3

She “passes out” until it’s time for her to go work again? Is this a euphemism for “falling asleep”, or is she really passing out?

She has reliable, loving, and free child care. Why would anyone want to mess with that? How old is she?

4

Sorry, I did mean falls asleep. We commonly just say “pass out” for that here, particularly the kind of sleep that’s really hard to wake people from. She sleeps really deep. There have been time when I get in the shower after she gets home and have to get out half way through since the baby has been crying for 10 minutes, screaming banshee type yells, and she’s slept through the entire thing. I don’t think it’s anything else, she’s always been kind of heavy I guess I just expected her to outgrow some of it.

And she turned 18 fairly recently.

5

I mean “kind of a heavy sleeper”. Preview would be my friend if I ever remembered it.

6

Well, can your family call her on it? Just don’t get rid of the animals.

7

I’m of the mind that if you can’t sit your sister down and tell her all about herself,
then who the hell can you do it with? Honestly, even if it weren’t for the animal situation, I’d be calling for a family meeting. Nip it in the bud now so that she doesn’t start developing unrealistic expectations of what’s normal.

8

monstro and j666 I know I should talk with her, but I never see her for longer than the 30 seconds it takes her to hand the baby off to me and tell me to watch him. She doesn’t even ask me and if I try to say I can’t right then she leaves the house anyway. I have no idea how to make her listen. Even my parents are now saying it’s easy just to give in so she doesn’t give one of her spewing fits. I think this is entirely the wrong method to take with her, but I’m just her sister so I don’t really get any say in how to handle her. If you have any advice on how to get her to stay in the house long enough for a family meeting I’d love to do this.

9

I hate to even ask, but did she *want *this baby? Was she pressured, or would she say she was pressured by the family in any way at all to continue a pregnancy she wanted to abort, or to keep the baby she wanted to give up for adoption?

I ask because if this child is a wanted one, it sounds to me like she needs to be evaluated for something called post-partum depression. It’s a mental illness, a clinical depression, that often happens in the year following childbirth. It’s thought to be caused not just by your world turning upside down and the worry and stress that children bring, but by the hormones that flood your body during and after pregnancy. Many women have it, and the symptoms often include sleeping a lot, and very heavily, taking no interest or even disliking your baby, and irrational thinking. Very severe cases are called post-partum psychosis, and can even lead to terrible things like suicide or women killing their babies. If she does have this, she needs to be seeing a doctor who can help her, through drugs or talk therapy, parenting classes, or some combination of those and other things.

Or, y’know, she could be a raving bitch with a huge entitlement complex. You’d know better than I.

10

Ah, given that she’s acting like a self-centered fool, perhaps she’s a self-centered fool?

Look, she’s got a new baby, whom she apparently ignores almost totally, instead living her life like she has no obligations or relatonships outside her own peronal amusements. That’s… not kosher. She’s using her baby as emotional leverage to force the rest of the family to do as she pleases. This will not be the last time. If she wins she’ll do it again and again to get whatever she wants.

She doesn’t happen to be the girl who slept with my brother in Iowa, is she?

11

It is blackmail. She is using the kid and your attachment to get her way. Call her on it. She will come back for free baby sitting very soon.

12

I also think it may be post-partum depression. I had a friend who went through it and her actions were very similar to the ones you are describling in your sister. Has she always been this way?

The other option is that she is just a bitch, in which case I agree with calling her on it. I take it there is no free babysitting at the boyfriend’s house? Even if there is I doubt they would take her attitude as well as her own family does. She will most likely come crawling back fairly quickly.

13

Coffinjumper Welcome to the board.

Anyway maybe it is post pardum as** Shera ** says.

14

There’s an old saying: nobody ever took care of anything they got for free.

ETA: The free housing and free childcare, I mean, not the baby.

15

Yes, you tell her you’re going to call the police for child abandonment if she doesn’t make arrangements - with someone who will agree to it - before she leaves the baby. And then you stand firm and do it. Call the cops on her. Yes, she’ll scream and shriek at you. Yes, she might hit you. Then you press charges.

She needs help. Either she needs medical help or a wake up call help. You’re not going to see her change by continuing to do the same thing. If she won’t listen to her sister and parents, then she’ll have to listen to a judge.

If your parents won’t back you up though, you have a problem. It sounds like you’re still living at home yourself - is baby duty part of your unspoken agreement in lieu of rent? If so, then you need to talk to your folks about a mutually acceptable schedule, and demand cash for additional baby sitting hours beyond that. If they don’t respect your boundaries, then perhaps it’s time for you to move out.

You can’t control what other people do. But you can mostly control whether or not you’re around to be affected by it.

16

It was entirely her decision, none of us pushed her towards it. I know mom has had an abortion beofre after us, and even suggested it as a possibility, so if she felt pressure it was from elsewhere.

This is my permanent address, but the majority of the year I’m living in my dorm room. I was planning on fully trying to move out after graduation. Babysitting was never brought up, I was just told to help clean when I was home, but with it being such a recent development I guess I can see how it might have been assumed. I’ll bring it up. Thanks for the advice.

As for the multiple people who brought up post-partum, it’s possible. She’s always been rather entitled and treated any new member of the family like her own doll as long as she was interested. It isn’t new, but it did increase when she got pregnant. We figured a big part of that was since her boyfriend went to jail then and she just missed him.

I am at the least going to bring all of these suggestion up to my parents to discuss. I doubt I can do any of this alone to get her to listen, but I’ll try and hopefully I won’t have to. Thanks everyone, really. It helps just to be able to get a plan together first and I couldn’t think.

17

All you can do is think about what’s best for her baby. CPS might help, if she decides to follow through with her threat. It definitely sounds like the kid would be in danger if you guys weren’t there to take care of him.

18

This is an incredibly toothless threat. She’s threatening that if you don’t take care of the baby’s every need for her, she’ll do it herself?

Call her on it. She’ll fold.

19

tdn, I’m guessing that her baby daddy’s family lives in the other house, so they’d be stuck taking care of the little one while she parties. I wonder how eager they are to take on that role.

Maybe Pullet’s parents and his parents should have a chat about what is going on, and agree on a course of action.

20

Agreed. Unless the baby’s father’s family is willing to put up with this behavior - and they might be - in which case, poor baby, but unless there is a reason to get CPS involved, not a lot you can do.

(My guess is that baby’s father’s family won’t put up with the behavior for long either - if your parents have ANY contact with these people and they are at all reasonable human beings (something about their son being in jail makes me have doubts) they may want to have a discussion about the shared grandchild and its piss poor parents and what each set of grandparents is WILLING to do. Often, however, in an absent father situation the paternal grandparents are pretty quick to ditch responsibility - and a conversation about your sister moving in with them and them being responsible for the baby and her may be quite enough for them to run for it.)