Teen Delivers Dad a Heartbreaking Gift for 50th Birthday After Years of Feeling Ignored in Favor of Stepsiblings

A 17-year-old boy turned to Reddit for guidance after a painful confrontation with his father during his 50th birthday celebration.

For years, the teen said, he had been quietly enduring the feeling of being pushed aside in favor of his dad’s wife’s children. When the milestone birthday arrived, he decided to express his frustration in a way that couldn’t be ignored.

Instead of offering a card or a wrapped present, he gave his father a handwritten list. “I gave him the list I wrote to keep track of all the times he made me miss extracurricular activities so her kids wouldn’t miss theirs,” he explained. “That was my present for him.”

According to the teen, his stepmother had insisted that he write a “nice card” and pick out a gift, but he said he couldn’t bring himself to celebrate a man who had repeatedly chosen others over him. “I knew it was going to piss him and his wife off,” he admitted, “but it’s always bothered me because he became such a lazy dad to me when he started dating his wife.”

When his father and stepmother confronted him about the gesture, he told them it was “the gift of having his eyes opened to the way he prioritized her kids over me.” His stepmother, he said, called him “incredibly arrogant” for keeping track of every instance he was left behind.

The teen explained that he’d long felt his father “cared more about her and proving himself to her than he did about being a good dad.” His mother, he added, was not in the picture — “Don’t know why. My dad never gave me an answer about what happened to her.”

His father met his current wife when the boy was seven, and things began to shift almost immediately. “They dated for years without living together,” he recalled, “but even then, he’d get me kicked out of activities for no-shows because he said he’d take his wife’s kids to theirs. For some reason, he couldn’t get all three of us to our activities.”

The boy said his dad had first signed him up for football when he was five, but after six unexplained absences, he was removed from the team. Each time, he said, his dad was busy driving his wife’s children to their events.

The same pattern repeated with every new activity — karate, football again, art classes, basketball, swimming. Each one ended the same way: missed sessions, frustration, and eventually being dropped.

Meanwhile, the teen said, he often sat on the sidelines watching his stepsiblings pursue their interests. “The kid he dropped off last is the one he stayed to watch or parked outside the activity of,” he said. “And they had loads of activities.”

Even before the families lived together, his father’s priorities were clear. “My dad and his wife only moved in together when I was 14,” he wrote, “so he was doing all this for kids he didn’t live with and messing me over in the process. Then he refused to pay for anything because he decided to take over paying for his wife’s kids.”

Repeated attempts to talk about it were dismissed, he said. “I tried to talk to him in a calm and mature way but he brushed me off. So I resented him more for it.”

When his father’s 50th birthday came around, the teen decided to stop pretending. “I told them I didn’t care about my dad’s birthday or his feelings because he won’t confront that he didn’t deserve anything from me,” he wrote.

Afterward, his father and stepmother kept bringing up the incident, but the teen said he didn’t regret it. “They made a big deal out of it,” he said. “But instead of giving me the cold shoulder, they’ve complained so much that I’m tired of hearing it.”

Many Reddit users empathized with the teen, describing his father’s behavior as selfish and neglectful. One commenter wrote, “I’m sorry OP… this sounds heartbreaking. Your father is incredibly selfish.”

The teen replied that he was already preparing to move forward. “I started saving when I turned 16,” he said. “I wanted to be able to get the f— out at 18 and knew I needed money to stand a chance.”

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