Spoiled Adopted Sister Gave a Speech at Her Birthday Party Calling Me a Failure, Saying That’s...

My spoiled adopted sister gave a speech at her birthday party, calling me a failure, saying that's why they adopted her. Then our aunt revealed she's actually my sister's birth mother. I have been brought up alongside my adoptive younger sister, Angela, and she is, for the lack of better or more accurate adjectives, a total spoiled brat and a horrible person in general.

We are just a year apart in age; I am 19, and she's 18. A few days back, we celebrated her birthday. Her birthdays have always been a huge deal because she likes to make a whole thing out of it, and our parents also go along with it.

This time was no different. I celebrated my 19th birthday a couple of months ago, but it was relatively different because I did not have a huge party. I just went out with a couple of friends and spent the day with them.

For me, that was good enough, and that's exactly what I had wanted because I really don't like huge parties or crowds. But that's Angela's thing, and whatever; if she likes it, then good for her. However, for some reason, she decided to use that against me to humiliate me during her party.

After everybody had come over and the guests were enjoying themselves, she decided that she was going to make a speech. At the beginning, she thanked everybody and said some normal stuff. Then she moved to our parents and started thanking them for having adopted her into the family.

After that, she thanked them for treating her better than their own daughter, which is why she always had such huge blowout parties for her birthdays, but I never did. That was where things started getting weird because I felt like it was getting too personal for me. Anyway, it was true that Angela had always been treated slightly better than me and got away with most things, but for her to bring it up like that—especially in the context of birthdays, since the reason I did not have such huge parties was because I did not want that—it was just weird.

Then it started to get worse. She started flexing about how she had always been the better daughter to our parents and how grateful she was to them for having raised her differently so that she didn't turn out to be a failure like me. I don't know on what basis she called me a failure and herself a success, but she was just saying things at that point, and it was getting pretty nasty.

She just kept dissing me over and over again, and all I could do was stand there in shock because I had not been expecting to be put on the spot like that. She made fun of my appearance, my grades, and even my style. Lastly, she wrapped things up by speaking about how grateful she was that I was such a failure because that was probably why our parents had adopted her, so they would at least have one daughter who was not a total loser.

After she ended her nasty little speech, everyone was dumbstruck, including our parents. I couldn't even bring myself to move or say anything because I was so shocked and humiliated at that moment. Even though Angela and I did not get along at all, this was something really extreme, and I don't think anybody had seen it coming.

Then, while we were all frozen in our places, my aunt decided to break the tension and walked over to where I was standing so she could hand over an envelope to me. It was really confusing, but I took the envelope from her, and she told me not to open it until she was done talking. So, I did just that.

The second speech of the evening was somehow even more insane than whatever Angela had said and managed to top even her in terms of the shock factor, because that's how we found out that Angela hadn't been adopted by any adoption agency; she had been adopted by our parents from our aunt herself. My aunt announced that she had been planning to talk to our parents after the party to tell them that she wanted to speak to Angela about her real parentage since, now that she was 16, she was old enough to handle the truth. Back when she had gotten pregnant with Angela, she was not ready to be a mother yet but did not want to terminate the pregnancy either.

She and her boyfriend were not even committed and did not have any plans to marry, so she went with the next best option and asked my mother, her older sister, to adopt her baby. My mom gladly agreed because she didn't want a sibling for me, but given the complications in her first pregnancy, she wasn't sure if getting pregnant again would be a good idea. So, this was a good solution for both of them, and they decided to work it out but kept it all a secret from everybody else since they didn't want the family to start gossiping.

My aunt talked about how she had always believed that if her daughter was being raised by my mother, she was going to grow up to be a wonderful person. But clearly, she had been wrong judging by the incident that had just taken place because no decent person in their right mind would ever try to humiliate their sibling the way Angela had tried to do, and my aunt was ashamed of her. I finally felt a bit vindicated when my aunt said that because I felt like there was finally somebody to stand up for me.

Then, my aunt told me to open the envelope, and when I did, I found a blank check inside. And she told me that I could fill in my details, and whatever amount I quoted would be mine. Initially, she had planned on handing this to her daughter as a birthday gift, but now that she had seen how her daughter had turned out to be, she had no interest in giving her any sort of gift at all.

Then my aunt walked out of the party, and Angela completely lost it. I'm not even joking; she literally came running towards me to grab the check out of my hands, but I was quick enough to take it out of her reach. My parents had to pull her back because she was acting so hysterical.

It did not even matter to her that she had just found out who her actual mother was; all she cared about was the blank check. But I decided not to fight with her in front of those people, so I went back to my room and locked myself in. I did not leave my room for almost two hours.

I could hear things going on in the living room downstairs, but I did not bother myself with it and just kept talking to my friends so I could keep my nerves calm. When I finally came out of my room, everybody had left, and Angela was crying on the couch with my parents seated beside her. As soon as they saw me, my parents told me that they were really sorry about everything that had happened at the party.

Then they made Angela apologize to me as well, but it was very obvious to me that she did not actually mean the apology. She was only saying sorry for the sake of it because our parents were sitting right there, and they had probably instructed her to apologize to me. I knew that she was unwilling to even act sorry, so I said nothing to her apology.

But then my parents told me that now that Angela had apologized, I needed to give that check to her because it was rightfully hers. It was then that I chose to finally speak up, and I told them that I was not going to do that because it was not rightfully hers anymore. My aunt had planned to give it to her, but after what she had done, it had been handed over to me right in front of them.

So rightfully, it was mine now, and they could not emotionally manipulate me into forgiving Angela and handing over the check to her. After I said that, Angela started crying as loudly as she could, so much so that it felt like she was trying to drown out the sound of everything else. But I did not allow that to get to me.

I kept trying to speak over the sound of her crying and said that for years they had both treated Angela like she was above everybody else, and now she had actually started to believe that. Otherwise, she would never have thought that she could make such a humiliating and nasty speech about me in front of so many people and get away with it. Nobody in their right mind would do such a thing and expect the victim of their actions to be fine with it, except for maybe my parents and Angela because they were just that entitled.

However, I had had enough of this being treated like a second-class citizen in my own home, and that speech that Angela had made had been the last straw. She and I had had our fair share of differences, but there was no explanation or excuse for this. And now I was going to take the money that my aunt had handed over to me and make sure that I moved out as soon as possible.

I was already staying away for most of the year because I was in college right now, and I had only come back home for my semester break. But now I was never going to come back again. I told them that I was done with this family because, truth be told, this had never been my family in the first place.

Even though Angela was the one who had been adopted into the family, I was always the one who had been treated like an outcast, and they had never made me feel like I was one of their own. While I was saying these things, Angela started crying even louder and louder. I don't even know how she was managing to do that, but it got to the point where her voice was literally breaking.

My parents had to intervene, saying that I was making her upset and that I needed to leave because I was being selfish and mean on purpose, and that's not what this family stood for. They told me that Angela had already apologized for the little speech that she had made and that she was sorry about everything, but if I couldn't find it in myself to forgive her, then I could leave since I was done with this family. My parents were pretty clear about what they wanted, so I went upstairs to my room, packed my bags, and walked out that very instant.

I could have gone to stay with my friends, but I decided to head over to my aunt's place on purpose because I had a lot of questions, and I needed to talk to her. So I have been staying with her since then. My classes don't start again for a few weeks, so I think I'm going to be staying with her until then, and it has made my family reasonably upset, so that's a good thing as well.

Anyway, after all that had happened, I really did not think that my family would stoop so low as to try and contact me again. Because they wanted the money, but two days after I left, my parents decided to reach out to me once again. They believed that I couldn't just abandon my family like this simply because the circumstances were tough.

They had been trying to call me, but I did not answer, so they decided to start texting me instead. That's when I decided to reply to them. Angela hadn't sent me anything; it had mostly been my parents blowing up my phone with messages saying that I needed to come back to them.

It was all the same nonsense about how we were family, how we needed to stick together as one unit, that Angela was really sorry, and apparently, she had only made that speech as a prank. That sibling rivalry shouldn't get so intense that it ruins families. It was really annoying for me to be reading these messages because they were all just so tone-deaf.

It made me feel like, no matter what had happened, it was my responsibility to fix things, forgive Angela, and make sure that everyone was happy. Besides, I knew that they were not reaching out to me because they suddenly actually cared for me; they were reaching out because they wanted that check. So, I decided to mess with them, and here is where I might have been the "a" in this situation.

Because yesterday, after being bothered by my parents for several days, I decided to send them a message saying that I was ready to hand over the check to Angela, but only on one condition. The condition that I set forth was that Angela would have to publicly apologize to me, and my parents would have to publicly disown her if they wanted me to hand over the check. If they were ready to agree to my terms, I was ready to speak to them.

If not, I told them that they did not need to bother reaching back out to me again because I was simply not interested in anything that they had to say if they were going to try to bargain with me. Of course, I have no actual intention of sticking to any of this; I just wanted to mess with them and play some games. I just wanted to put them in a very difficult spot, and I think I succeeded because ever since I sent that message, all three of them have been messaging me nonstop, trying to get me to be reasonable.

They have even said that they are all ready to apologize to me publicly, but disowning Angela seems a bit extreme of a punishment for them. However, I have made it very clear that I'm not going to change my terms, and if they want the check, they're going to have to do as I say. They can forget about the money.

My aunt thinks it's a bit twisted, but she's fine with it because she had witnessed firsthand how I had been treated at the party. It's actually my friends who think that I'm taking things way too far, and now that I think about it, I might actually be taking it too far since I don't have any intentions of living up to what I said, even if they do what I said. Besides, it's not like they can sue me for it since we are not under contract or whatever.

I did it for playing mind games with my family after I was humiliated at my sister's birthday party. Edit: Angela has known that she had been adopted at birth since she was five years old, and I was also told about it around the same time. Back then, it was really not a big deal for either of us because we were way too young to understand what it meant.

Then later on, as we grew older, she learned to come to terms with it, and it has nothing to do with me, so I didn't really care about it. I have never brought it up in an argument or whatever and have never used it against her until, of course, the incident that took place recently. I think at that time it was necessary for me to speak about it because things had gone way too far for me to handle in a dignified manner.

Anyway, that was that. Now a lot of you had been asking how nobody in the family had ever managed to find out that my aunt had been pregnant and how everyone just came to accept that Angela was my mom's daughter if she hadn't been pregnant at all at the time. Since these things show, well, from whatever my aunt has told me, the two of them had been living out of state at the time and came back home very rarely.

So while she was pregnant, they would keep their visits home short and secretive so that nobody would be able to find out that my aunt was pregnant and my mom was. In fact, they did not even announce or tell anyone about the pregnancy until the baby was actually born. It was very difficult, but they managed to hide the pregnancy, and only my grandparents and a couple of other people in the family who could be trusted with a secret were aware of this.

The rest of the extended family and stuff had no idea until recently. My aunt is still unmarried and has never had kids; it's just not her thing. But she wanted to build a relationship with Angela because that's her actual daughter.

She had no intention of becoming a maternal figure to her or replacing my mom in her life, so to speak, but she wanted to at least tell her the truth because she figured that it was about time. However, she changed her mind after whatever went down at the party the other day. It's a huge loss for Angela.

I'm being honest because, as you guys may have guessed by now, my aunt is pretty loaded. She works in a pretty high-level corporate position and had even been supporting our parents in the past couple of years after she had saved enough money for herself and gotten promoted a couple of times so she could show them how thankful she was to them for having adopted Angela. Now, though, I don't think she's going to keep doing that anymore, so it really is a huge loss for all of them.

**Update 1:** Thank you to everybody who reached out to me and commented on my post. I guess I didn't need to make a decision about what I wanted to do at all, because three days after I gave them the ultimatum and set forth the condition, my parents reached out to me and told me that this wasn't going to be easy and that they needed more time to think about what they wanted to do. Angela did not text me at all then.

Three days from then, today, they decided to reach out to me once again and told me that I had put them in a very difficult position and that it was very unfair for me to be putting them through this right now, as if that matters to me after whatever they had put me through so many years. Anyway, they told me that Angela was on board with whatever I had said. She was ready to publicly apologize for the check, and she also thought that it would be fine for them to publicly disown her since she didn't think that they would have to stick to it.

I did say that they needed to make that announcement publicly, but I couldn't enforce it, and that was true; it was a loophole. But if they decided to use that loophole and continue to have a good relationship even after my parents made an announcement about publicly disowning her, it would just reflect badly on my parents and her because it would be quite weird and spineless. So they were in a stalemate right now because they could agree that it was fine for Angela to apologize publicly, but they were not ready to publicly disown her because then if they continued to have a relationship with her, it would reflect badly on them, and they were not ready to toy with their reputation over something like this.

They have been fighting over this for the past couple of days, and right now even Angela is not on speaking terms with my parents. So they are trying to get me to understand where they are coming from. For whatever reason, they genuinely believe that they can reason with me at the moment.

I don't know why they believe it or why they even think that texting me continuously is going to make me change my mind about anything. I already know for a fact that regardless of what they do in the future, I'm not going to give up that check under any circumstances. I just wanted to play with them, and I guess once they have made a decision, I'm going to tell them about it and let them know what an actual prank is, unlike what Angela had been claiming to do at her birthday party a couple of days back.

**Update 2:** Hi, so it's been two days since my last update, and today I finally decided to respond to my parents because I had been ignoring their texts so far since they were only trying to reason with me and bargain with me, and I was not interested in that. Anyway, today I finally came to them and I told them that I did not need a decision from them at all because so far I had only been playing with them. I actually did not have any intention of handing over the check to them regardless of what they decided, so they could stop beating themselves up over this.

I just wanted to put them in a tough spot and see how they would deal with it and show them exactly how much of a priority they were in Angela's life, which I guess they now have a hint of; they ranked somewhere below a ton of money. Anyway, after sending that message, I blocked them all and decided to get on with my day. But of course, this was not acceptable to them, and they decided to start trying to contact me from burner phones.

At first, I did not realize what was happening, so I ended up picking up a few calls, and as soon as I realized it was them on the other end of the line, I hung up immediately. Since then, I haven't answered any calls from unidentified numbers. So they started creating accounts on social media just so they would be able to contact me since I had blocked their personal accounts, and all they have had to say so far is that I am a terrible person, I do not deserve to be a part of this family, and that whatever I have been putting them through is downright psychotic and I deserve to be institutionalized.

None of that really makes a difference to me because I know that I was just messing with them, and it's a very small and petty sort of revenge for everything that I have been through all these years. They should actually be grateful to me that I have decided to end it here and not try and drag this out further only to punish them, because I'm more interested in moving on from this nonsense. But yeah, they should just be happy that I didn't do anything worse than this.

Anyway, I'm just going to be ignoring all the calls and messages because in a couple of. . .

Weeks, I'm going to be back to college anyway, so none of this really makes a difference to me. If they think that they can keep bothering me, and I'll bow down to them or something, they couldn't be more wrong. When I said that I was done with them, I really completely meant it, and they're going to see that now.

Update 3: Hey, so today Angela found out that I have been living at my aunt's place ever since I left. It was purely by accident because she decided to show up here this morning, and I was the one who opened the door without checking who was outside since I had been waiting for a food delivery. As soon as I saw that it was Angela, I tried to shut the door, but it was too late, and she forced her way in.

Immediately, she started yelling at me, saying that I was trying to steal her life. She accused me of first stealing the money that was supposed to be hers, and now I was even stealing her mother from her. That's when my aunt entered the room, and she told both of us to lay off of each other because she did not want things to get heated or violent.

She explained to Angela that it was her own behavior that had made her hand over the check to me, so it was quite unfair to be blaming me for any of that. Even now, if she had actually come over to build a relationship with her mother, it should have been with the purpose of purely building a relationship and not about the check. That episode was done and dusted with, and constantly bringing it up did not change my aunt's opinion about Angela; it was only going to make it worse.

My aunt was quite reasonable and polite, probably because she did not want to hurt Angela's feelings since it seemed as if she was already going through a lot. Her behavior was pretty hysterical, but Angela decided to start screaming at my aunt as well and told her that she had no right to be telling her what to do because she had abandoned her as a baby, and now she had to make up for it. She couldn't just take my side all the time and expect her to be fine with it.

That was totally unfair and completely untrue since Angela had definitely not been abandoned; she had been adopted by people that her mother trusted, and there was nothing wrong with that. My aunt even said that she had wanted to speak to her about the truth several times, but it was my parents who had said that she needed to wait it out until she was an adult so it would be easier for her to deal with. So, it was really unfair of her to blame her mother for everything.

She didn't have anything to apologize for or make up to Angela; her expectations were completely off on that one. But Angela did not seem to care; she just kept screaming at my aunt until she was forced out of the house. My aunt lost her temper as well, pushed her out, and told her that if she came back, she would call the cops.

Angela kept screaming outside our house, stomping her foot, and throwing a complete temper tantrum for a couple of minutes, but then she left. So this morning was totally crazy, and honestly, I can't wait to be back in college because I just need to get away from here. Update 4: So I'm back in college now, and I'm so relieved to be away from all the drama.

The last few weeks that I spent back in my hometown were not that great because Angela had found out that I was staying with my aunt, and well, you guys also know what happened because I had mentioned it in my last update. A couple of days after that, she showed up with my parents, and there was a huge fight between all of us. My parents accused me of trying to steal Angela's life, which she had already done herself, and my aunt tried to defend me once again, but my parents started telling her that she was pushing her own kid to the sidelines, and that was completely unfair.

I don't think they realized how ironic it was coming from their end because that's exactly what they have been doing to me all these years. When I brought it up with them, they started denying it. They told me that I had always gotten whatever I wanted, and yet I was so greedy that I couldn't even let Angela have one thing—that check that everybody was after.

They even accused my aunt of being stingy because she earned so much more than they did as a family, yet she couldn't just write Angela another check. I don't think they understood that it was not about the money for her; it was about a matter of principles. My aunt tried to explain it to them, but I didn't even think they were capable of understanding.

Eventually, it all just turned into a shouting match, and everybody was yelling at one another at the top of their lungs. It was so loud that the neighbors ended up calling the cops. After that, my parents left with Angela and promised that they would never speak to us again, and I'm fine with that, to be honest.

But from what I know, Angela has continued trying to get in touch with my aunt behind my parents' backs, probably because she thinks that she still stands a chance to get some sort of financial help from her, but that's my thing to deal with, so I'm not going to intrude on that. At least I have my check. And I have cashed it in, and I don't want to sound like I'm showing off, but I'm going to come into a lot of money soon enough.

I'm also going to be smart enough to put it aside for my future, just like my aunt advised me to.