Stepmom pressures her 35-year-old stepdaughter, who has a 4 and 8-year-old, to bring her 9-year-old half-brother on her family trip to Paris: 'Jake is not my responsibility and never will be.'

It's such bad manners to invite your kid to a vacation he wasn't included in! 

One of the hard realities of life is that you can only control yourself. You cannot force someone to be your friend, no matter how much you want them to. Luckily for most of us, we learn that lesson sometime during K-12, and therefore aren't spending all of our adult lives desperately trying to get attention from people that don't care about us. That lesson doesn't always stick, and some people are obsessed with building relationships with people who have shown, time and time again, to be uninterested in reciprocating. 

It's incredibly difficult to accept that your family might not care about having a close relationship with you. It hurts when your children's grandparents don't take a particular interest in spending time with them and put all the onus of scheduling such meetups on you. 

It's more understandable for adult children to be less invested in their divorced parents' "new families" than their parents might want them to be. If you're in your late twenties, and your dad has another child by a woman who is not your mom, you might not feel called to have a sibling bond with his child the way you would with your siblings. It's very difficult for kids (if a 27-year-old can even be considered a kid) with age gaps spanning decades to bond the same way siblings who grow up in the same house at the same time do. 

The adult daughter in this story has her own life and family, and she does not want to have to babysit her half-brother all the time just because her dad's wife wants to drop him off at her house whenever it's convenient for her. Not only that, but the stepmom is asking her stepdaughter to take her son (the stepdaughter's half-brother) on an international vacation with her family so she can get some "alone time" with her husband. If anything, they should never have alone time again to prevent them from having another child that they don't care to care for!