I’m going to set up the context for this so that everyone can understand what’s going on with my admittedly weird family dynamic. All names used are fake, ofc, and I’ve tweaked some details bc I’m not sure if any of my family members use Reddit. If they do and confront me about this…oh well, I guess.

Mom: My mom, lol

Vick: My now ex stepdad, recently divorced from my mom

Pam: Vick’s mom

Frankie: My younger sister, shares mom with me and is not Vick’s child

Marissa: My step-sister, Vick’s daughter from previous relationship

For starters: Vick isn’t even technically my step-dad anymore since he and my mom have divorced. The cliff-notes on that is that they were together for nearly 30 years and most of that was my mom raising two and a half kids, since most of what Vick did when he wasn’t at work was either go drinking with his buddies or play CoD with those buddies nonstop. He would always complain that my sister and I didn’t “respect him as a dad” but he never even tried to be a dad. At most he was a guy that lived in our house and made the living room inaccessible nearly 24/7. The divorce was a long time coming and my sister and I knew mom was just waiting out the clock until my sister could move out. 

Vick didn’t take the divorce well. He tried to become a good man but it was 25 years too late and my mom refused to take him back. Honestly, I think he just realized that he was going to have to clean his own house and cook his own food for the first time in his life. When he realized my mom wasn't budging, he got a new woman. She seems incredibly nice and sweet and I have absolutely no beef with her. She looks a lot like my mother but we’re gonna let that lay where it falls. They got engaged and the wedding is upcoming. I got an invite.

I feel incredibly weird about it mostly because…well, we’re not family anymore? Sure, he’s been in my life for as long as I can remember, but we don’t have much of a relationship. I can’t recall us ever having a deep conversation or him ever taking interest in anything I was doing as a kid. While I acknowledge and appreciate that his salary kept us afloat, there’s way more to parenting than just money. I don’t consider him to be my dad, and I’m in my early 30s now so I don’t need a dad anymore. They live about 5 hours away from me and my spouse, and since I can’t drive and my spouse has chronic pain it would be a really difficult trip for both of us, but I was going to suck it up and make nice, go have an unpleasant couple of hours and put it all behind me. 

Then I realized there was a chance that Pam (Vick’s mom) could be there.

The moment I had that thought, I knew I was not going. 

Pam is a typical southern woman and she has the “kindness in the front, contempt in the back” shtick down to the letter. This woman hated my mother and made it known in a thousand subtle ways – ways that my mother could never point to as proof because separately they could all be accidents or mishaps or miscommunications. But if you’ve ever had to deal with someone like this, you know it’s all on purpose, and the subtlety is also on purpose. Her contempt extended to my sister and I despite the fact that when mom and Vick got together, I was in early middle school and my sister was in elementary school. This woman had beef with literal children. From my understanding, she didn’t think my mother was good enough for Vick and she didn’t want Vick raising someone else’s kids – which made sense in a way since SHE was raising Marissa, Vick’s kid from his first relationship. There’s tons of history here that isn't relevant, but just understand that Marissa was family, and Frankie and I were not. 

This woman is one of the only people in my life who has ever made me feel like less than a person. And I’m queer and disabled and black so the fact that someone who should have been family tops any bigot or asshole I’ve ever met should tell you something. 

One of my most formative memories is spending Christmas morning sitting at Pam’s dining room table watching Marissa open what must have been, and I am not exaggerating, 30 to 40 gifts. Thousands of dollars worth of presents of all kinds. Frankie and I? Got cash bonds. We got single envelopes with pieces of paper that could be given to the bank in exchange for cash…in 15 years. So, in essence, we got nothing for Christmas. It took her MORE EFFORT to get these bonds than to put $20 in a card and call it a day. She went out of her way to deprive us of Christmas gifts. But, of course, we were expected to be grateful and smile and say thank you despite the fact that we then had to spend hours sitting on the outskirts of our step-sisters’ enormous gift pile. (Yes, we got presents from other family members, but imagine the whiplash of getting wonderful thought out gifts from your grandmother and then having to go over to your other “grandmother’s” house and experience that.)

To cap it off? We were told that the bonds would appreciate to $500. So, ~15 years later, I take the bonds to the banks to cash them in. Those bonds did NOT, in fact, appreciate to $500. They didn’t even appreciate to $100.

They appreciated to $10. I waited 15 years for 10 fucking dollars.

There are plenty of other Pam stories and they all have this same vibe. Like the one time Frankie and I had to spend the night at her house and we were made to sleep on the living room couches with no pillows or blankets. Neither of us slept because it was so cold in the house that we couldn't fall asleep. After we told mom we never stayed over again.

The idea of having to make nice small talk, having to smile and pretend I didn’t want to climb out of my skin, having her ask polite questions about my life knowing that she’d be sneering about my answers to her family back home? No. I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t deal. I’ve only recently learned to actually use my adult agency to prevent myself from ending up in uncomfortable situations, and this was one of the only times it wasn’t hard to convince myself to do what was best for me instead of what was nice for someone else. 

I told my spouse all this and told them I was going to lie to get out of it. No skin off their back, they wouldn’t have to make the miserable drive. The problem was that I don’t actually know if Pam is going to be there. The branching problem is that I can’t ask. If I ask, my response will be too obviously correlated. Even a more broad “who from the fam is going to be there” would likely trip the wire. So I just decided to wash my hands of the whole thing.

My idea was to lie and say that we’d been exposed to Covid since that’s easy, and after the wedding I could just say we got lucky and didn’t actually get sick. My spouse encouraged me to blame it on their chronic pain since it was a real problem and would continue to be a problem in the future that we could “rely on”, both in truth and lies. 

Swearing her to secrecy, I talked to Frankie about it and she agreed that I should just lie and not show up. She’s closer to Vick than I am, both distance-wise and emotionally, so she plans to just suck it up and go and avoid Pam if she’s there (because she's so much braver than me). However, a friend of mine (who doesn’t have much family of her own) is telling me that I’m completely out of line. I don’t think I’m able to make her understand how much Pam has hurt me. She believes it was so long ago that both of us are totally different people now. She keeps saying that maybe we could build something new now that I’m grown. But…I don’t really care if Pam is a different person now. I don’t care if she’s a better person now. I don’t want her in my life.

She suggested I post here despite the fact that I rarely use my reddit account for anything but checking gaming industry news. So, tell me what you think, Reddit.

AITA?