Man Asks if He’s Wrong for Telling His Stepmom She’s Not the Most Important Person in His Life

I can’t imagine asking anyone if I was the most important person in their life…

But, as we all know, people are strange and you never know what you’re gonna get on any given day.

So is this guy wrong for what he said to his stepmother?

Let’s see what the heck is going on here…

AITA for telling my stepmother she’s not the most important woman in my life?

“My dad is married to Jani.

They’ve been together for a little over six years and married for about four now. Dad was a widower when they met. I’m 16f and my siblings are 14f and 12m. Our mom d**d 8 years ago. Jani has not adjusted well to being a stepparent. I think she thought she would be just a parent to us because our mom had d**d and didn’t consider that we’d still talk about and have photos of mom.

Over the years she has been to therapy and her and my dad have gone to couples sessions. In the last year the five of us have gone to family therapy and she has admitted it’s hard for her because she feels like she’s second best or a consolation to us and that we don’t really love and want her. Dad assured her that *we* all love her just as much as mom, that she’s his number one and is vital to our family.

For a while then in sessions she and the therapist would talk about how she feels like she’s not a true member of the family, like she’s a second class member, not someone we see as important in the structure of the family. She said she never felt love from any of us and she feels like even extended family, which she explicitly said was grandparents and any aunts and uncles, come before her when it comes to us kids.

She said she sees it in so many things including the way we don’t regard her parents as our grandparents or her two sisters as our aunts and how when I turned 16 and we did a nice dinner party, my guest list included both my mom and dad’s sides of the family but not her side.

My sister was the first to speak during all this and she said nothing was ever done to make her feel bad. That she just doesn’t think of her as her mom or as being her parent. Once that was said she was talking about how much that makes her feel bad and like she’s not truly accepted.

The therapist asked us to consider whether we’d be willing to deepen the relationship so she felt equally as loved and important as our dad and dad wanted us to consider ditching our typical Christmas dynamic and spend the time with her parents exclusively this year.

Then three weeks ago she brought up that I had made something for class that went into details on my family and she pointed out that she and her family were not mentioned. Then she asked me why my grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins were mentioned on both sides, all with their own pages, but I couldn’t make room for the most important woman in my life (her).

I told her because she is not the most important woman in my life. I told her that will always be my mom, followed by both my grandma’s. She asked if she was just second best then, if she was unimportant and I refused to answer. Afterward my dad and Jani both told me that I was cruel to say she wasn’t the most important woman in my life when she is there every day and has done her best.

AITA?”