Although many of us have felt the sting of being excluded from a bonding activity, it hurts a lot more when the people shutting you out are your own family.
Worse yet, it often seems to happen for the most petty and superficial reasons if the relatives doing it even have the guts to give us a reason at all.
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But while this can hurt when it happens after you’ve come of age, it stings even more in childhood and when you’ve just crossed the threshold of adulthood.
For some, this is a hard lesson to recognize who the people they once trusted showed themselves to be. But for others, the temptation to clap back with a move that’s just as petty is a strong one.
And when one teen did just that, her execution and the reason behind it made it hard for people to argue with her.
For one college student with two half siblings, it seems that her family hasn’t been much of a refuge lately.
As she explained in a Reddit post , that was because the 18-year-old’s family took an Easter photo they were planning to make into a card for their extended family that they left her out of.
Although they said this was because she was away at college, that excuse didn’t hold water because she’s a 25-minute drive away from them at most.
Her stepdad also slipped up and said it only involved the “close family.”
Although the teen was hurt, this gave her and her friends (not pictured) an idea to play a prank on her family with a trip to Walmart’s photo shop.
She not only made sure to make them deliberately cheesy, but also used props, costumes, and makeup to make her friends look like her mom and stepdad.
As she put it, “My friend is really talented with makeup and honestly did a great job making them look like them.”
And not only were the results funnier than the serious photos her family tends to take, but some relatives apparently didn’t notice the difference when she swapped out the real Easter cards for her parody versions.
So when these relatives told her mom how funny their photo was, this incensed her and it made her even angrier when she realized what had happened.
Not only was she miffed that the family didn’t get the real photos, but she accused her daughter of embarrassing the family by putting “cross dressers” in the photo.
In the teen’s words, “I told her that I didn’t get why she was upset about being left out of the family photo, apparently it isn’t a big deal to be treated like you’re not part of the family!”
This led the mom to dismiss this response as “sassing” her and she sent her away, which now has the teen wondering if she went too far.
And while many commenters on Reddit would consider this a jerk move in a vacuum, they had a hard time disapproving in this case.
As one user said , “I love your sense of humor! Wish I was this creative and petty. Love to see it!”
There were also some who found the mom’s “cross dresser” comment suspicious, while another person warned the teen from experience about what was likely going on in her family.
In their words, “I’d watch out about your step dad, seems like he’s working on turning your mom against you. He started in the same way with me, by leaving me out of family photos when I’d be away at my paternal grandparents’ house.”
As a result of his machinations, this second user has been estranged from their mom for the last four years.
h/t: Reddit | daisydelo
