I am the “terrible daughter”. At least, that’s the narrative my family has aggressively decided to spin. If you scroll through my brother’s Facebook feed right now, you’ll see his post sitting right at the top of his page.

Last week, he shared a generic, passive-aggressive quote graphic about how “some people don’t value their own mother” when she needs them the most.

He added a caption about how heartbreaking it is to see elders placed in the “cheapest facility” by people who just don’t want to deal with them anymore. That post got 47 likes. Most of them were from our extended family—aunts and cousins who haven’t bothered to call my mother in five years.

My sister chimed in right there in the comments, adding a crying face emoji and saying it was a tragedy. This is the same sister who, at our family Easter dinner, called me heartless right in front of the kids because I had to make the tough calls regarding Mom’s care.

To them, I was just dumping her. I was the undisputed villain. What none of those 47 people clicking “like” bothered to ask was how much Sunrise actually costs. They see a modest assisted living community and assume I just bargain-hunted for my mother’s twilight years.

The reality is that Sunrise is $4,800 a month. That is a staggering amount of money for almost anyone, but let me put my financial reality into perspective for you. I am a 4th-grade teacher. My salary, before taxes and health insurance, is $41,000 a year.

My mother’s care totals $57,600 a year. When Mom first started deteriorating, we realized her small fixed income wouldn’t even cover a fraction of the assisted living she desperately needed.

I stepped up. I assumed we would all step up as a family. I was incredibly naive.

I have been paying for this completely alone. I sat down with my brother two years ago and laid out the spreadsheets. I asked my brother to split it, or at least contribute a third. He looked at my meticulously highlighted math, sighed heavily, and told me, “I’ll look into it”.

That was two years ago, and he has not given me a dollar since. My sister was even worse. When I called her crying, exhausted from working extra tutoring shifts just to make the first payment, she immediately got defensive. She explicitly told me, “I have my own family” to take care of.

She couldn’t possibly be expected to drain her savings because I decided to put Mom in that specific place. Things apparently weren’t that tight for either of them. In March, my sister and her husband took a lavish trip to Cancun, splashing pictures of their beachfront resort all over Instagram.

A month later, she casually mentioned in the family group chat that they had just finished remodeling their master bathroom. It was a complete gut job that she openly bragged cost her $14,000. My brother isn’t exactly hurting either.