Woman Does Not Want to Change Plans So She Can Spend Time with Her Nieces

A 30-year-old woman named Ryan is the kind of woman who values her independence above any other thing. She is pretty much devoted to her hobbies, which are basically hiking and backpacking.

Without a long-term relationship and estranged from her family for a long time, Ryan didn’t have anything that prevented her from engaging with her hobbies.

Ryan naturally loves to spend her summers doing her favorite activities, and she proudly recalls having completed the Colorado trail twice and having done long stretches of the Continental Divide.

Living in a mountain town, it was the easiest thing for Ryan to rent out her space for weeks during the summer to go hiking and backpacking, so it was totally against her plans when her sister Lily called her ahead of the summer.

Lily had come up with the plan of flying out with her two daughters Emily and Natalie, to stay with “Aunt” Ryan for a few weeks over the summer. Ryan never saw this coming since she had never even met her nieces up to then.

As Ryan explains, she moved away from home at 18, and she had never returned even to visit. As Ryan says in her defense, none of her relatives paid her a visit in all the years that had gone by either.

When Ryan moved out, she says, she made attempts to stay in touch with her family and remain involved in their lives, but they were never reciprocated, according to her. She maintains that nobody in her family ever called her.

With all of this in her mind, Ryan bluntly told Lily that she wasn’t really interested in her plan, to which she wanted to know why. Ryan then explained that she spent her summers traveling around and never spent more than a week at home.

Lily insisted that Ryan change her plans only for one summer since she considered it was about time for her to get to know Emily and Natalie. The truth is that Ryan suspected that she had other reasons for her plan.

As Ryan put it, Lily had spent several months at home alone with her two daughters because she had recently divorced, and she now wanted to have her help get through the summer with the two little girls.

Ryan didn’t want to have anything to do with this, and she told Lily that she was not going to change her plans. Lily kept saying that it was her opportunity to make up for being such a distant family member.

Not touched by Lily’s argument, Ryan cynically asked her sister why she believed that getting to know her nieces could benefit her in any way and how meeting Emily and Natalie would contribute to her life.

Lily couldn’t even begin to answer the question, and she just hung up on her, obviously disappointed. A few days later, Ryan received an email from her furious mother telling her that she couldn’t believe her disinterest in the family.

Ryan feels pretty confident that she is not doing anything wrong by not wanting to sacrifice her summer plans. Still, she keeps hearing her mother’s voice in her head condemning her for being so unloving toward her sister and her daughters.

What would you do in such a situation? Is Ryan selfish by only devoting herself to pursue her hobbies and not caring about bonding with her family? Or is it actually her sister Lily that is acting selfish and is trying to take advantage of her?

If this #storyoftheday gave you something to think about, click here to read about the man who let his sister adopt his unborn baby instead of a friend that desperately wanted a baby.