I(21) found out my whole family was going on a vacation when I was told to look after the family pet.

A 21-year-old Reddit user shared their feelings of hurt and abandonment after discovering that their family went on vacation without them while they were asked to look after the family pet. The user, who is away at university, feels like an outsider and heartbroken, especially since it has been years since their last family vacation.

After expressing their feelings in a message, they received a response accusing them of ruining the vacation. The user is now seeking advice on how to forgive their family and move forward.

‘ I(21) found out my whole family was going on a vacation when I was told to look after the family pet.’

My siblings have yet to move out of from our childhood home and I’ve been of to uni. I am so empty and it feels so godamn horrible. I’ve been trying to act like I didn’t care but when they were driving to the airport I couldn’t stop crying. My mother was so hurt and they kept saying they loved me.

Last time we went to a family vacation was when I was around 13. I cried so much I had cramps in my abdomen. I wrote them a message trying to make them understand what I was feeling and that it hurt me alot. I got back that I was ruining the vacation and to just accept it.

They said they thought I wanted to be “free”. I know it might have been an a**hole move to mention this at the first day of their vacation, but the pictures they sent being all happy made all my emotions I’ve tried to hide come through.

I’ve never felt this left out and I feel like I’m not a family member. I’m trapped in this house taking care of an animal when they are out being a family on Holliday.. I feel heartbroken. My plan right now is to leave the pet with a relative and go back to Uni and dive into school to forget. How can I forgive them? Has this happened to anyone else?.

Here’s how people reacted to the post:

[Reddit User] −  Did they tell you about the vacation before asking if you can watch the pet or after?

Otherwise_Window −  My plan right now is to leave the pet with an relative and go back to Uni and dive into school to forget.. Good plan.

[Reddit User] −  Sorry OP! My family did similar things when I was your age. I think it came from my mom’s deep resentment about my being out of the house and independent. Let me ask…do your parents ever make n**ty comments about how you’re “selfish” for going off to college?

Do they ever claim that you don’t care about them, and then you have to scramble to “prove” that you’re not a bad child for having an independent adult life? When I was a little younger than you, my grandmother (who I was very close to) fell and was hospitalized.

They didn’t even tell me she was in the hospital and never apologized for keeping me out of the loop because it was “my fault” for “leaving” the family by going off to school. My parents have very skewed priorities, and my mom in particular tried to make me dependent on her and shamed me if I seemed too independent in her eyes.

Hopefully this doesn’t ring a bell for you. But if it does, then they might have excluded you from the vacation as a way of manipulating you into feeling like you’re an outsider to the family. If they can succeed in that, then they can make you feel like you need to grovel and beg to be included again.

Trotterswithatwist −  It’s happened to me too OP. As soon as a I went to uni my family acted as if I had died. My room was boxed up (which made absolutely zero sense because it was never used as anything else after), my things were put away, family stopped putting me in Christmas cards (both giving and receiving) and I wasn’t invited to any family holidays.

I got the same weird excuse as you “we thought you’d grown up/wouldn’t want to/were too busy”. It hurts, it really does. I’m so sorry this has happened to you too. Unfortunately sometimes a family isn’t this unconditional, loving, supportive unit that it’s suppose to be. I realised I only talk to my family *because* they are family,

if they were friends we would have nothing in common. I spent years during that time trying to earn their love, impress them with achievements and grades, but it just ended up making me deeply stressed and unhappy and their opinion never changed. You don’t have to forgive them at all unless you want to. What they did was awful.

ArthurWasTheVillian −  A few years ago my family went on a vacation to Gettysburg, which our family vacations growing up were civil war battlefields, and didnt tell me until a few days before they left and i asked why they didnt even tell me they were going let alone why i wasnt invited and they were like well we thought you and the wife(now ex) were busy with things… we werent we couldve totally gone with them. Im still angry about it.

JudySpy −  I’m 22 years old and my family just got back from their third vacation without me while I watched my dogs at home alone. Honestly, try to confront your family or even one family member you confide in and tell them how you feel and that you want spend time with them.

Depending on who you talk to, try to evoke their emotions by explaining you want to share the memories with them. This could go well, in which case you are no longer left out, or this could not go as you hope which is where I’m at with the third vacation without me now. If they leave you at home again, use the time to do things you want and surround yourself with people you want to spend time with.

cbrewdrummer −  My dad remarried when I was 10 and then had two daughters with his new wife. It was clear that they had their perfect family and as much as my step mom tried to include my brother and I, it was obvious we were just kids from his first marriage.

A few years ago, the four of them went to Jamaica on vacation around Christmas. I had never been on a island resort vacation and they were fully aware of that. They asked me if I’d like to go with my gf at the time. I was ecstatic, I’d always wanted to go to the Caribbean. I said of course!

They said they could pay $300 of the $2400 ticket, which in itself is still a $300 gift and I appreciated that but unfortunately, I had tuition to pay and it didn’t make sense financially for me to spend that kind of money on a trip while struggling to put myself through college.

I told them I couldn’t afford it and that I would have to stay home. Here’s the kicker, my stepmom then told the entire extended family at our Xmas gathering that she had offered to pay for my trip and that I had rejected her offer.

skyscan1 −  Hey OP, it happened to me too. When I was in college I had two jobs to support myself and pay for college. I wasn’t able to do much fun activities because money for me was so tight. My dad had a d**g problem and had been in d**g rehab several times which made money very tight for them.

My parents spent all the money I had saved for college to help pay their bills. After I had been paying my way in college for three years they tell me they are planning a trip to Hawaii. I ask if my sister is going and they say that it’s a family trip. I check the dates and it’s between summer and fall classes. It’s perfect.

I let them know that I can go. Well a few months go by and I don’t hear any more plans. I see about the trip and I’m told that they bought the plane tickets for them but not for me. I ask why I’m not included and my mother who has a history of abusing me screams at me that she knows I said I couldn’t go and for me not to change my mind now.

I tried to explain that I had always been able to go but she tells me the tickets are too expensive now. The week before they flew out I was asked to take care of their pets. I was so upset to be left out. I guess they had the money to go on a big vacation because they weren’t having to help me pay for college.

Two years later my sister began college and they paid all her expenses. She never had to work while in college. It’s bad when everything they did tells you that you weren’t important to them. I asked them years later why they paid for my sister and not for me. They said it was because I seemed to enjoy the work and I liked being self sufficient. That’s not how I saw it at all.

[Reddit User] −  I’d drop off the pet if you have someone suitable and leave for uni. I would not even contact them. They don’t seem to care about you, so why would you care about them? It sucks, but at some point you need to realise that you can choose your family and there is no need to be around assholes.

cheeselover214 −  my parents have tried to do this with me(19F) as well, taking my younger sister (16F) on a week long trip to a country I really want to go to, because we have 2 dogs and one is mine, I should be at home watching them. Instead I went with them, had to pay everything myself (including the dog hotel for both dogs).

I still kind of resent them because of this. I feel like they always try to pull things like this and if you are the eldest sister that is probably why.

Have you ever experienced a situation where you felt excluded from your family or left out of important events? How did you handle it? Share your thoughts and experiences below.