Dear Prudence,
My parents divorced when I was a baby. My father met his second wife, and they spent the next 20 years having the craziest marriage. So there is: my stepsister (Rose), my half-brother (Roger), his affair child (Ruth), her affair child (Ryan), and their reconciliation baby (Rachel). The only two siblings I have had any semblance of a relationship with are Rachel and Roger, because we are close in age. I have only met Ruth a handful of times. And for the most part of my childhood, my mother kept me away from the crazy. It was just my mom and me. And that is the phrase that I usually use to describe my childhood in the casual sense.
Well, apparently Rose went snooping through my social media and found a few posts where I refer to myself as “basically” an only child. For some reason, this offended her and she went tattling to her mother. Now, everyone has their nose out of joint over this. I ended up having an emotional knock-down fight with my father. He couldn’t believe I would be so “cruel” as to publicly post that. I told him Rose shouldn’t have been stalking my social media and if he wanted to throw around accusations of cruelty, I reminded him that between the birth of Ryan and Rachel, I saw him a grand total of three times. And we lived in the same city. Since then, everything has been a mess. What should I do?
—Only Child