'AITA for not wanting my biological family at my wedding after they gave me up for adoption?'

"AITA for not inviting my birth family to my wedding even when my sister offered to pay for them?"

Proud_Crazy_7666 writes:

I was placed for adoption at birth. My older (bio) sister was placed when she was 5 months old. We're three years apart in age and were adopted by the same parents and raised in the same family.

I also have other siblings I grew up with who have no biological connection to me. My sister tried to rope me into a birth family search, but I told her I didn't want to find them and offered her my support from the outside. That was as much as I was willing to give.

She found them five years ago and has been in regular contact with them since. Our family supported this, and my parents have met my birth parents in an effort to support my sister. However, I still choose not to meet them or have them in my life.

My sister has passed letters to me from them and has been trying for years to get me to agree to meet with them and build a relationship. They keep saying how much it hurts them that I want nothing to do with them.

She passes this onto me and tells me how much it hurts her that I won't be a part of this with her because our connection as blood-related siblings is huge and now we have more blood-related family (her way of putting it). I told her there is no part of me that wants to meet them and nothing I want from them.

She told me she knows I have to want answers, and I said no, I already know the answers: they were young when they had us and didn't want to be parents at that time. She asked how I knew that, and I told her I did listen to her after she met them for the first time.

It's been so messy. I get letters from them about once a month, and I try giving them back to no avail, so I dispose of them and have never read them. I'm not interested. I can't be more clear than that.

Now I'm getting married, and my sister fought for them to be invited. She offered to pay for them to come and told me she would cover all the costs associated with their place on the guest list, and I still said no.

She called me crying after she had been at their house because they were so upset to be missing it. She said, "Our bio dad wants to walk you down the aisle," and I told her that's not going to happen and that their being upset wasn't a strong motivator for me.

I also warned her that the place we're getting married has security, and we already added them to our package (my fiancé has a couple of family members we need to have monitored in case they get too drunk), and I can easily pass on info about our birth family to keep them out if she tries sneaking them in.

My sister said I'm being unreasonable. My parents assured me they support me either way but want me to know I don't need to take my stance for their sakes (we had this discussion before too), and they'd be fine with them coming.

My sister said if mom and dad don't care, I should want my whole family at my wedding, and I told her they will be. I don't consider our birth family my family for real. Her reaction was even stronger when the invites were sent out, and our birth family didn't get any. AITA?

OP responded to some comments:

NanaLeonie says:

NTA (Not the A^@*ole). Good grief. The biological father wants to give OP away a second time. Did he think he was fostering out his two daughters till he was ready to claim them as his heirs?

OP responded:

Our birth parents always hoped we would all reconnect one day and become the family they were too young for us to be at the time. That's what they told my sister and what she believes. I believe it too. And I don't hate them. But I feel no inner desire to have that be our reality. They're just random strangers in my eyes.

Ipso-Pacto-Facto says:

Yet 3 years later they had another child they gave up.

OP responded:

Yeah, they were still very young when they had me. I don't hate them for it. I think they were likely uneducated when it came to procreation, which my sister expressed too. It's not something I hate them for but not hating them doesn't mean wanting to know them either. Something my sister cannot grasp.

KalitheBlaze says:

NTA. You get to choose what place your adoptive parents have in your life. It’s good that they realized that they didn’t have the wherewithal to be good parents when they were kids having kids, because it sounds like that choice has given you a secure, happy upbringing. Adoption can involve a lot of big, strong feelings for adoptees, and there’s often some degree of psychological trauma involved.

Their choices and their mental health should be the priority. For some adoptees, that means it can run the gamut between feeling desperate to connect with the bio family and not wanting anything to do with them. None of those choices are wrong, and every adoptee needs to make the choice for themselves.

Your bio family can be very important to your sister, and nobody to you. The reason she’s TA here is because she’s insisting that you have to want the same things she wants and consider your genetic donors to be family.

She doesn’t get to decide how you relate to them any more than she gets to decide who should be your romantic partner or where you should work. It was okay for her to be excited, and okay for her to encourage you to get to know them the first time, but once you made your feelings known, she needed to stop.

OP responded:

Yes! Adoption is such a complex issue and my sister and I are proof of how different adoptees can feel about it. For my sister, there was a strong desire to know the people who made her and where she came from.

She always felt a part of her was missing by not knowing them. She loves our family but always felt like she needed to know and deserved to have a relationship with her birth family. It was something so important to her and I always sorta knew that. She wondered who she looked like for example.

It was so different for me because I never felt anyone or anything was missing from my life. I was never curious about who I looked like. I never thought about one day meeting the people who made me.

I always knew they existed and that I was theirs first technically. But for me I always felt like I ended up where I belong and I never saw myself wanting to have two sets of parents and two sets of siblings or anything. My sister loved the idea.

What do you think?