Usually, there is a lot to be said for helping aging parents, especially when everyone is trying to keep a roof over a shared family home. In plenty of families, it feels natural to pitch in when people who raised you start to slow down. Here, the story is different from the foundation up. The person being asked to help is the one who was raised by a grandmother, told in writing not to ask her own parents for school money, and who has already spent most of adult life standing on their own.

Siblings see someone stable and child-free and assume there is extra cash lying around. From their side, splitting a sub-2k mortgage three ways while all living there feels like a joint project, so adding one more sibling to the mix just seems fair. The problem is that the sibling they want help from never got that same home base, never had a room in that house, and remembers soy sauce on the only school uniform and talks of being shipped abroad to «dance» instead of going to class. Asking that person to now fund the comfort of the very people who made childhood harder lands differently.