Family Feuds·
THE BOWLING DILEMMA
A teenage girl wrestles with her family's strategy of leaving their high-functioning autistic 13-year-old home while the twins bowl, weighing fairness against safety and growing sibling tensions.
Was leaving him home the only way out?
Be one of the first to vote.
A 16-year-old girl says her family's fix for a difficult 13-year-old stepbrother is to leave him home alone while everyone else goes bowling.
She says she has three little stepbrothers. The oldest is 13 and "high functioning autistic," and she describes him as someone who throws "a fit if things aren't his way." The other two are 11-year-old twins. Their mom and dad are separate, and the narrator says the family recently learned that when their mom takes the twins out, she leaves the autistic boy behind.
That part, she says, is "not okay by any means."
But she also says she understands why it happens.
According to her, the twins told her their brother "ruins everything." She lists the reasons they gave: he refuses to be anywhere longer than "a half hour," he won't eat anything he considers "evil," including "any veggies or dairy," and he "regularly attacks his brothers." Even when the narrator goes out with them, she says, "he causes scenes."
So when the mother leaves him home and takes the twins bowling, the narrator says she gets the reasoning. In her telling, it gives the younger boys "their own life to some degree, without it being all about their older brother."
That's where the guilt kicks in.
The 16-year-old says she feels bad for agreeing with the logic behind leaving him behind, even while she believes the situation itself is wrong. She lays out the tension plainly: the autistic stepbrother is hard to manage, the twins want some space, and the outings become impossible when he is included. But at the same time, she knows leaving a 13-year-old alone is not the answer.
Still, she says she understands why the family is doing it.
She ends by asking the internet the question directly: "So, AITAH?"