My parents split up when I was fourteen. I was a big boy, and I was well aware that adults split up for their own reasons and get back together with others, so I was not at all surprised when, before a year had passed, my father had a woman. She became my stepmother and brought my half-sister into the house. Anna was a sweet and quiet girl, with whom it was quite normal to share a room, but I was happy to move at seventeen to a dormitory away from my family. Even then I noticed that my father and stepmother were more concerned about their daughter, since she was two years younger than me and it was harder for her to fit into the “new family.
When in the third year I rented an apartment with my classmate, with whom we had a relationship, my parents called and asked to temporarily house Anna, as she would also study at my university, but did not want to live in the dormitory. My parents did nothing of the sort for me, thinking that since I was a boy, it would be easy to live with other boys, but about Anna they said, “Well she’s a girl, she wouldn’t be comfortable living with others!”
There was nothing to do, so I took Anna in. It was quite expected that the first year stepmother would support her financially, but with the kind of spending she was doing every month, she could obviously afford to rent a separate apartment. She was getting fancy new clothes, buying new appliances for her, and yet my parents did nothing for me. To the point that when Anna broke the washing machine in her rented apartment, my dad replied that she was still young and my girlfriend and I had to pay for the repairs out of our own pockets.
Luckily, right after graduation, my girlfriend and I got married and moved in temporarily with her parents, making it possible to get rid of Anna. We were beginning to have married life, we were saving to buy a house, and my wife’s parents were helping us a lot, while mine, again, wouldn’t give me a penny. So we’re twenty-six, Anna’s twenty-four, just getting a job, and I find out that my father and stepmother took out a loan for her and gave her a two-bedroom apartment. She had no fiancé, no kids, and my wife was expecting a baby.
I was very offended, I called my father to ask why I, my own child, was not presented with such a gift, and he said that I have a mother-in-law and father-in-law, so let them buy it. I have never met a more spiteful attitude. I think I have parents, and I think I have been an orphan since my father’s divorce…
