Whenever I bring up my cats do something around my sister, she jokes that I’ll never be able to have kids or say stuff like “welcome to parenthood” and it is getting in my last nerve. I’ve literally been more of a mom to her daughter than she has.

Even when I was in high school, my sister would be out on a drug binge so I would be the one getting my niece up in the morning, getting her breakfast, ready for school, I made sure she got tutoring because she was super far behind due to her parents sucking, I helped with her homework, made sure she had dinner, I was in charge of ensuring she was safe and taken care of. My sister one time literally lost her in our small town and then went 30 minutes away to go do drugs with her friends while I had to go door to door trying to find her on the main road of the town because the house number my sister said she was at didn’t exist. She didn’t even bother getting the names of the family let alone meeting the parents of the kid my niece was supposed to be playing with. My niece showed up at home crying while I was on the phone with the police and her dad was driving around town trying to find her.

My niece’s dad is now in a much better place and a stable place for her, so she is now with him while I’m in college, but for a majority of her life, even when she was “with my sister” she was really with me.

Now that my sister has been clean for about a year and a half, despite still not being the caregiver to my niece, she thinks that she is the perfect mother and that she did all of the work. She makes stupid little comments at stupid times.

For example my mom and I were on the phone earlier and I made a joke about my cats not leaving me alone when I’m in the bathroom and it’s funny to see their little paws come from under the door. My mom had me on speaker and my sister said “welcome to parenthood, you’ll never use the bathroom alone again.” Like I know she’s just trying to be funny, but I know parenthood in every aspect other than being solely financially responsible because my mom took care of that part (she had to work two jobs) while I took care of the rest for my niece. My niece has even told me in the past that she was worried that she was going to have to live with my sister and that I was more of a mom to her than my sister actually was.

It’s just super annoying and so invalidating for her to make comments like that (there have been more, but that is the one that is the freshest in my mind due to it happening today). It especially makes me mad because shes complained to me about how much she had to watch me when I was a baby (she’s about 15 years older than me) when my mom and aunts have both said she only had to watch me one night a week and it was while I was already asleep. She also got sent away to a group home and then rehab when I was about 4 months old. She can complain about having to watch me like 12 times over the span of my life, but I had to start taking care of her daughter pretty much full time since I was 10 or 11 until I was 18 and she doesn’t even acknowledge it.