The famous opening line of Leo Tolstoy's Anna Karenina is, "All happy families are alike; each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way." You see a lot of different kinds of family stories if you're scouring the internet like we are here. Parents who stepped up, parents who stepped out. Children with allegiances to parents other people wouldn't understand. There's only so much you can say in a Reddit post to create a full image of your family situation. And yet, people do it every day, trying to glean any understanding of their predicament from the anonymous advice of fellow Redditors. A shout to the void, a call to the abyss. "Can anyone hear me?" "Does anyone relate?" More often than not, people do, and they have a lot to say about it.
Take this story, for example, where OP's uniquely strained family situation comes to a head when his half-siblings try to connect with him after their mother's passing. Estranged from his half-siblings at a young age, OP spent his upbringing with his father. When his half-siblings reach out to him with the intent of pulling him away from his father, he has to grapple with their life story as well as his own. Do you agree with his decision?
