Reddit Stories - The IDENTICAL sibling CONSISTENTLY RECEIVED all the mother's focus due to their striking

Episode Date: November 18, 2025

#redditstories #askreddit #aita #siblings #familydynamics #parenting #favoritism #emotionalimpactSummary: The identical sibling consistently received all the mother's focus due to their striking appearance, causing emotional turmoil and resentment within the family.Tags: redditstories, askreddit, reddit, aita, tifu, siblings, familydynamics, parenting, favoritism, emotionalimpact, resentment, familyconflict, siblingrivalry, childhoodtrauma, emotionalneglect, psychologicalimpact, familyrelationships, mentalhealth, emotionalwellbeing, familytherapyBecome a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/reddit-stories--6237355/support.

I hope you enjoy this story. The identical sibling consistently received all the mother's focus due to their striking resemblance, leaving me feeling neglected. Eventually, they inherited all assets and proceeded to evict both me and our younger sibling. Our mom passed away. My mom had three kids, my twin sister and I, 26F, and then our little brother. Michelle, my sister, and I are not identical twins. we are fraternal twins, and it was quite difficult growing up with her because I always got

treated differently since I looked different from her. Actually, to be more precise, it was not the fact that I looked different from her, it was the fact that I looked so different from my mother that made her treat me like I was not her daughter at all. Michelle was the spitting image of our mom from when she was younger, and obviously she was really stunning too, so my mother was constantly acting like she didn't care about anybody else in the world apart from her darling daughter and was constantly trying to groom her into becoming a mini-her. For a couple of years when I was a child, I constantly tried to get her attention, but it never worked.

When I grew older, I even went to the extent of trying to imitate how they looked, but that just made them make fun of me. So eventually I just stopped and accepted the fact that I was never going to be that important to them. By then I had my brother, and he seemed to adore me the way I was, so it didn't matter. My biological parents got married when they were around 23, and they had had to get married because of their family since my mother was already pregnant by then after a four-year relationship with my dad.

She had aspirations of becoming a model and had even been modeling for a couple of years by then, but after she got pregnant, she decided to quit and become a stay-at-home mom. Unfortunately, we lost my dad in an accident six years after she got married. My sister and I were young at the time, so my mother would leave us with her mom while she went out to work, and that's how she met her next husband. Three years after our dad's passing, she decided to get married again, and that's how our stepdad became part of our lives. My stepdad was a nice guy, and since he's the only father in my life that I actually remember, I would say that having him around did improve our family dynamics. He always tried to be

inclusive and occasionally even told my mom to be better to me, and sometimes it worked. But that was not the best thing that he had done for me. The best thing that was the best thing that he had done for me. The best thing was that he and my mother had given me my younger brother Dennis. He's 12 years younger than me, but he's still the joy of my life, and I really don't think that I would have been able to make it through all these years without him. He is really attached to me and a huge part of the reason why I'd even bothered to stay in touch with my mom and Michelle for so many years. Even after my stepdad passed away a few years ago, he passed away from cardiac arrest,

and even though he was just in his late 50s, it did not come as a shock to him. any of us because he had actually been struggling with heart problems for a really long time. Just a few months after his demise, my mother called us both and told us that she had been diagnosed with stomach cancer. Even though she did undergo treatment for a couple of years, we lost her about six weeks back. After her diagnosis, both of us moved back home to be with her, but that's just what she told everybody else we knew. The truth was that she actually only wanted Michelle by her side, and I was only there because she needed somebody to look after Dennis since she did not want him to be removed from her custody, since she was obviously medically unfit.

I did suggest taking Dennis home with me and, saying that, I would bring him over to visit her on the weekends. That way I wouldn't have to stay with her full time because that honestly sounded like a true nightmare since it would require me to stay with her and Michelle in the same house for God knows how long. But my mother was very firm about what she wanted, and since we knew for a fact that she was not going to make it, it was really hard for me to say no to her. Even Dennis did not want to leave because he was a teenager, he was used to a certain life, and I lived quite far away from everything that he knew. He was already losing his mother, it was a difficult and traumatic experience for him as it is. Ultimately, even I did not think

it would be appropriate to remove him from my mother's custody at the time, so ever since my mother had been diagnosed, the four of us had been living in the same house. When we finally lost her, I was a bit sad, and obviously Dennis was really upset because even though he did not like the way my mother treated me differently as compared to my sister, she treated him well and he was kind of attached to her. But both of us had actually expected Michelle to be the most affected by her demise and had believed that she was going to be totally shattered when we finally lost her. However, what came as a shock to us was her behavior right after her passing. Since literally nobody in their right mind would be able to guess that she had just lost her mother, instead of

devastated or even a little sad, she seemed to be completely unaffected and went about her life as if nothing had happened at all. Within a few days, she actually seemed happier than she had been before. About a week after our mother's passing, her lawyer and the executor of her will told us that she had left pretty much everything to Michelle. When my stepdad passed away, whatever money and assets he had had been passed on to her because his family wasn't really interested, so she had sold his assets, and all the money from that was going to go to Dennis. He was in a trust that he could access when he was 18, and all that I had received was her wedding ring from when she used to be married to my father. It wasn't worth much

monetarily because both of them were really young and the wedding was a bit of a hasty affair, but it was enough for me. I was not surprised that she had left everything to Michelle. She was pretty predictable, and I knew this was going to happen. I was a little jealous, but there was nothing that I could do about it, and I have a stable job of my own as well, so I tried not to let it affect me too much. But while I had no reaction after being told that I had received pretty much nothing of financial value, Michelle actually rolled her eyes when the lawyer told her that her mother had left her everything and even a bunch of letters after she was gone. Even the lawyer seemed to be taken aback by her reaction but did not say anything.

However, I could not stop myself from asking what was going on with her, and after the lawyer had left, I decided to finally address her weird behavior. I was not confrontational or rude, I just asked her politely, and she explained to me that she had really tried to be unhappy when our mother had passed away, but she just couldn't bring herself to feel bad because all her life she had hated our mom. That statement came as a huge shock because I could have never even thought that Michelle of all people would hate our mother. But then she told me that our mother had apparently always pressured her to become exactly

like her without caring about what she wanted. Right from her childhood, she had been told to watch her wait, and our mother would actively monitor whatever she ate. I knew that it was true because I had seen that happening. It wasn't just that. Our mom apparently forced her to dress up the way she wanted her to and even did her make up the way she liked and constantly tried to make her look like some version of herself. She told me that for as long as we had been living with our mom, she had never been able to be herself even for a second because she knew that her mother wouldn't like it, and she had seen how our mom treated me, so she did not want to get on her bad side by being disobedient. This is why she always went along

with whatever our mother told her without any complaint, she was aware of the fact that it would definitely pay off if she stayed on our mom's good side because my mom actually used to make a decent amount of money. After my mom got remarried, she quit her job again to stay home and take care of us. But a little after my brother was born, my mom and my stepdad decided that she was going to go back to work again because they needed the money to finance raising three kids. However, instead of taking up some conventional job, my mother decided that she was going to start life coaching. Basically, she was going to tell rich people basic things that they could have learned by themselves if they just looked up inspirational quotes on Google or

whatever. It was a total scam, but it was her friend's business, and she had been hired because rich people liked to throw money at random stuff. Their business actually ended up doing well, and she became a partner eventually. This is what she had been doing to earn money until her diagnosis, after which she decided to quit but still continued to make some passive income from it. I think at the time of her passing, she was richer than my stepdad had been earlier, so of course it's a lot of money that is going to Michelle. Even in the past, because Michelle had bothered to stay on our mother's good side, pretty much everything had been taken care of for her. But to hear Michelle talk about our mother like this and share how much pressure she had actually

been under because of our mom, it made me realize that it was probably not all sunshine and rainbows for her either. That was a real moment of substance that she had for me when she was telling me about what she had been through and how difficult it had been for her to keep sucking up to our mother and live by her rules even as an adult. After my sister graduated college, she wanted to work and start her own restaurant, but our mother forced her to start modeling so that she could probably live out her own dreams through Michelle or whatever, and she couldn't even say no. So for the past couple of years, she had been extremely busy and didn't even have time to breathe because she was either auditioning for modeling gigs or working at her day job and

trying to save up money. But now that she had the inheritance, she was going to use that to put it into her business, and she was really relieved that she could stop trying to be her mother's ideal daughter now. After she said that to me, I actually gave her a hug and stuff, and even though we had never been particularly close before, I thought that maybe now we could actually start trying to become friends. But instead, a couple of days after that, she told me that she wanted me and Dennis to vacate the house because she was planning on moving her boyfriend and business partner in with her, and because it would get awkward to have all of us live together, she wanted us to leave. I would be happy to leave because I wanted some personal space of my own as well, but the

only problem was that Dennis did not want to leave. Even if I had planned on leaving, I would still need some time because I had ended the lease on my previous apartment and I would have to look for a new one before I even considered moving out. I tried to explain the situation to her and said that it was just a matter of a few years before Dennis graduated high school, and then she could have the house to herself because I definitely did not want to stay here. For now, if she really wanted to move her boyfriend in here, she could either stay with us, or maybe she could rent an apartment with him. It wouldn't even be a problem for her because she had come into a lot of money recently, and I didn't think that I was being unreasonable. I would like to

reiterate that I was not doing this for myself. I had no interest in the house, but I just wanted to have some sense of stability in his life and not, move out of the house and neighborhood that he had grown up and all of a sudden just after his mother passed away. It wouldn't be good for him, and even she knew that. But instead of taking my suggestion into consideration, she told me that she didn't care about any of that, she just wanted us out at any cost, because now the house belongs to her and she gets to decide who stays here and who doesn't. So that was pretty insulting, and even though she had given us until the end of the week to move out. I decided to move out the very next day and go stay with a friend for a couple of days.

Dennis came along with me without any complaints because I had explained the situation to him, and I hadn't even bothered to hide anything that Michelle had said because I wanted him to know exactly what kind of person Michelle was so he would learn not to hope for better behavior from her. I had thought that we might be able to bond after she confessed that she had hated our mother and, after, being a little vulnerable. But then she kicked us out of the house, and I learned my lesson. After we left, I had absolutely no contact with her because it did not seem necessary anymore. Dennis was with me, and even though he was not really happy about the situation, he had made his peace with it since we couldn't really do anything about it. Now it's been close to a week

of no contact with Michelle, but yesterday she called me up and started crying hysterically on the phone because apparently she had given away something extremely important and now she wanted my help to have, it returned to her. That's why I feel like I'm very confused about what to do, because the thing that she had given away was my mom's jewelry box. It was all incredibly expensive stuff that my mother had bought for herself over the years, and she would occasionally wear these things, so they had stayed with her in the house itself instead of bank lockers. She kept it in a wooden box in her closet,

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That nobody would take it. I guess that's why Michelle hadn't been mindful while giving away our mom's belonging so that she could get rid of everything in her room and make space for her boyfriend to move in with her, since that was the biggest room in the house. But now she had realized that she had carelessly given it away, and she had been stupid enough to tell her friend who had received the box about what it contained, and now her friend was refusing to return it to her. I found it really confusing that she was calling me for this and not a lawyer because as far as I was concerned, she could just take this friend of hers to court, and I'm pretty sure that the will would help her get it back without much of a challenge. So I told her to talk to a lawyer and not to me,

but then she told me that she couldn't possibly take this to court because apparently this friend is her boyfriend's sister, and he has made it very clear that Michelle can try whatever she wants to get the jewelry back, but he believes that once a gift has been given away, it's impolite to ask for it back. He has also told her that if she tries to take this to court, he's going to dump her immediately, and their relationship and business together will be off forever. She can't even speak to anybody else about this because she knows that if her boyfriend finds out, he will leave her for trying to ruin his family's reputation. So with nobody else to go too, she decided to call me and start begging me to help her out somehow. She had been so

incredibly stupid and selfish throughout this entire thing that, I decided to tell her not to call me again, and then I blocked her. But now I feel kind of bad about it. I'da for refusing to help my sister retrieve her mother's jewelry that she had accidentally given away? Edit. I had not mentioned any of this in my original post because I did not think it was relevant to the situation, but since a lot of people have asked me, I'm currently staying with my friend. Dennis is also with me since I'm his legal guardian. He is closest to me, and the two of us had already discussed this with our mother before she passed away, so all the paperwork and stuff had been completed beforehand. I'm trying to look for apartments nearby since he doesn't want to

change schools right now, and I can totally understand because it's already difficult for him to deal with the loss of his mother, so naturally he doesn't want to lose his friends as well. My friend has been kind enough to let us stay with her since it's in the vicinity of his school and the commute is easier, but it's kind of difficult for me since my workplace is kind of far away from here. But I'm considering switching to a work-from-home job anyway since our company is fine with it. I just have to speak to my higher-ups and make a request. It's not going to change or affect my income, so I guess I'll be fine with that. Update 1, hey, so I don't think I'm going to be helping Michelle out with whatever is going on right now. This seems to be a problem

between her and her boyfriend and his sister, and it has nothing to do with me. In fact, I don't even think I'm going to gain anything by getting involved unnecessarily, and I really don't want to waste my time and energy on this. If she isn't strong enough to stand up to her boyfriend and is letting herself get bossed around by him, that hardly seems like my problem. Besides, I still can't forget how she had been so rude and selfish in the past couple of weeks, so I don't feel the need to help her out either. It has been more than four days since she tried to contact me, and after I blocked her, it took her a while to get to me again.

But then last evening, she sent me an email on my work email address. She probably found that on the Internet or something. There she sent me a really long message, and the first half was just her apologizing to me for being so selfish. She told me that she was just tired of putting her dreams and plans on hold for her family because all her life, that's exactly what she had been doing because of our mother. But now that our mother is gone, she couldn't wait to live life her way, and that's why she wanted me to leave with Dennis as soon as possible. She was only realizing how selfish it had been of her, and she was really sorry about it now.

After apologizing in that message, she also mentioned that since her mother was still in the probate stage, she was scared of the legal repercussions of giving away the jewelry. She hadn't even had the courage to speak to her mother's lawyer about it yet because she was afraid that she would get into trouble. Apparently, she had done some research on the internet, and she believed she has reason to be scared. But I honestly still think that if she just speaks to the lawyer and retrieves the jewelry, everything will be solved. I've never dealt with the law myself, but I have this thing called common sense, and I like to use it, and I wish she would too. I don't understand why she's still reaching out to me because neither do I know

her boyfriend nor do I know his sister, so I really don't understand what she expects me to do about this problem. I found the entire email really annoying because throughout it, she was just whining about how difficult the situation was for her and how she did not want to lose anybody. For someone who has literally kicked out her siblings from her house so that she could move her boyfriend in with her, she seems to be pretty weak and stupid here. I also don't understand how her boyfriend is investing in her business or whatever but can't afford to buy his sister, that is a jewelry and has to resort to stealing. Technically, I would call it stealing, because Michelle has made it pretty clear that she didn't

think there was anything significant in that box, and that's why she had given it away in a hurry. Any decent person with half a brain would return that box on being asked to do so. If they had realized that there was jewelry in that box that did not actually belong to them, it wouldn't be entirely wrong to keep it to themselves, but of course, then they would be opening themselves up to legal consequences, and I don't think decent people with common sense would do something like this. When it's so obvious that her boyfriend's sister does not seem to be a good person, and neither does he, since he's defending his sister and threatening

to break up with Michelle or something like that, she should dump these people and take them to court instead. But, she's choosing to waste her time writing stupid emails to me instead of speaking to the lawyer and fixing the problem. I really have no sympathy for her, and I just hope that she doesn't contact me again because I'm just really annoyed with her. Even if she does reach out to me again, I might just contact the lawyer myself and solve this problem for her now. Update 2, so I guess somehow Michelle got to know that I had been staying here with a friend. I don't know how she found out, but today she showed up and started apologizing to me. When I opened the door, I found it really awkward because Dennis was out with his friends, and my friend and I had been chatting in the

living room when this happened. It was kind of embarrassing because this was not even my house, and I did not want her to throw a tantrum there, so I asked her to stand outside the house with me so that we could talk. She told me that she had pulled a lot of strings to find out where I was staying, and she just needed a chance to speak to me. I don't know what she meant by that. When I asked her, she did not tell me, so please don't ask me how she found out where I was staying. Anyway, moving on, she told me that she meant every word of that apology, and she really was sorry for however I had been treated so far. Then she told me that she was even ready to prove it to me. That sounded a bit interesting, and I got curious, so I ended up asking her how she

planned on doing that. So then she told me that if I helped her out with what she needed to do, then she would split the inheritance with me, and that would be a huge help for me. I thought about it for a couple of minutes because she had indeed come into a lot of money recently, and after the probate, if she actually did split it with me, then I would be sorted for a couple of months. So after giving it some thought, I decided to agree, but I told her that this would only happen if we spoke to a lawyer and had a written agreement drawn up because I did not trust her. Surprisingly, she accepted that. She told me that she had given me enough reasons not to trust her, so she could totally understand where I was coming from, and I thought

that was respectable. Now all she wants me to do is speak to her boyfriend and his sister for her. That's literally all that I have to do, since she has been working up the courage to stand up to them but hasn't been able to do so yet. Also, I found out from her that her boyfriend wasn't even financing the business, so it certainly does make sense that his sister decided to keep the jewelry because they're obviously not rich. I had just assumed that he was financing the business because she had been talking about his investment, but that turned out to be his time and nothing else. Even so, he's only going to start working on the business

after she has actually set up the business, and so far he hasn't contributed anything at all, not even the time that he had promised. She would still be the only one actually putting money into it, and I personally thought it was an incredibly stupid idea, so I even told her about it to her face. She didn't say anything after that, but I hope that she takes it seriously and leaves him.

Until then, I'm going to wait for her to come back with the paperwork and have it signed, and then I guess I'm going to have to deal with her boyfriend and his sister. I can't even imagine them being very scary because I literally cannot think of a single reason why she needs to speak to them and can't do it herself. No, I don't think there's anything fishy going on. I think she's telling me the truth. She's just scared of the emotional aspect of it and doesn't want to be the bad guy to them. It's as simple as that.

Update 3. Hey, so it has been three weeks since my last update, and everything has worked out now. A couple of days after she spoke to me, she showed up again with the documents, and once I knew for a fact that she couldn't back out of this, I decided to go along with her so that we could speak to her boyfriend. After speaking to him, I could finally understand why she did not want to do it on her own. I had stalked him and his sister on social media, and I couldn't find anything shady, so I just assumed there was nothing going on, and there really wasn't. But unfortunately, what was actually going on with him, nobody would have spoken about it on social media, because as soon as I told him that I was here to speak to him on behalf of

Michelle about the jewelry, he immediately started freaking out. I don't mean freaking out in a way that was funny, he started screaming, shouting, and cursing at us. He directed most of it towards Michelle, who was just standing in a corner crying, and he cursed at her like crazy. The words and names that he used for her were not only derogatory but just disgusting, and I couldn't believe that an educated man like him was acting like this. He accused her of trying to ruin his family's reputation, and then when I tried to tell him that he and his sister were responsible for their own reputation, he started throwing stuff around and started cursing at me as well. He was acting like a total animal, and after a point, I started losing my temper as well, so we got into a heated

argument. I was pretty sure that if I had taken it further, he would have probably turned it into a physical brawl. I could actually see him trying to restrain himself, but I don't think it was because I was a woman, I think it was just because he knew that I wasn't Michelle, and if he did anything to me, I would immediately call the cops and he would be screwed. After arguing with me for a while and screaming some more, he decided to finally call his sister to get the box. While we were waiting for his sister to arrive, he had a lot of things to say about us, about our upbringing and our family, and he constantly kept up a stream of horrible things to say about Michelle while she just kept crying in the corner. I actually started feeling bad for her because if this is

what she had to deal with on a regular basis, I could understand why she needed my help. Anyway, after a while, his sister finally showed up and begrudgingly they handed over the box to Michelle. I could see that they were not willing to give it up, but they had to because otherwise they would get into legal trouble, since even though Michelle was scared of them, I wasn't. After the handover of the box was done, Michelle's boyfriend stormed out of the house after cursing at her and telling her that he never wanted to see her again because of what she had done, and she tried to talk to him and stop him from leaving, but he left anyway after pushing her aside. Then she totally broke down, and even though I had been mad at her for a really long time,

I started feeling bad for her, so I sat with her when I consoled her to the best of my abilities and told her that everything would be fine. She apologized to me for everything that she had put me through, and since then, we have managed to stay on good terms with each other. True to her word, she has told me that as soon as she receives the inheritance, she's going to be splitting it with me, and we are trying to build a stronger relationship now. Dennis and I have also moved out of my friend's apartment,

and even though Michelle has invited us back to stay with her, I think a few weeks apart before we do that will do us all some good. Right now, I just want to feel things out and see how they go, but hopefully we will be able to work it all out soon.