How much leeway do you give your family when it comes to letting you down?

I can’t tell you how many times in the past I’ve been made to feel like my feelings don’t matter or my opinion on something doesn’t count for anything, but after a while, at what point do you decide you’ve had enough of being manipulated?

Here’s the situation. We had a get-together planned for this Saturday. We did not get together on Christmas Day because it was put forward that we should have it at my apartment and I then requested that we wait until the following weekend because I had a very busy weekend before Christmas and then had to go to work today, the day after Christmas. The other partys involved were all off on vacation for anywhere from 10 to 16 days. Everybody said they were fine with that and we made plans to go out and eat at a restaurant and then come back to my place and exchange gifts and hang out.

My sister got covid about a week ago and although she’s pretty much over it, she’s still suffering a lot of side effects from the Paxlovid that she was on, mainly dizziness and nausea. So she messaged me earlier today and said she wasn’t sure how much she was going to feel up to doing on Saturday and that she may just want to go to the restaurant. I told her that of course I understood given the circumstances and that I would bring her and her husband’s gift to the restaurant

I then texted my other sister to let her know that our other sister might not come back to the apartment in case she wanted to bring their gifts to the restaurant. Now she has told me that her and her son are not coming back to my apartment either, and for no good reason except I guess they don’t feel like it. So I told her that, while I didn’t mind bringing my one sister’s and her husband’s gift to the restaurant because she had a good reason for maybe not feeling up to coming back to my place, I didn’t want to have to bring four gifts to the restaurant. It’s Saturday, it’s going to be busy, and like many restaurants seem to be doing nowadays, you cannot make a reservation. I don’t think there’s going to be that much spare room for five people to bring gifts for four other people, with a total of 20 gifts being passed around and being kept track of. So I told my second sister that if she didn’t want to come back with her son to my apartment, then we could wait until a later date to exchange gifts, which is when I was going to give her daughters their gift.

She had already let me know that her two daughters were not coming and I decided this year that I wasn’t just going to be the invisible Aunt who provides gifts but never gets to see them, so I let her know that we could plan a later get together, at her house if she wanted or they could come over to my place and then I would give them their gifts.

Now the second sister is not returning my texts and I’m just to the point that I’m just fed up. These are the same people that bullied me horribly when I was taking care of my mom and also constantly criticized me for not paying my mom rent when I was taking care of her for 3 years as her dementia worsened. Not to mention that my mom, while still very much in her right mind, had asked me if I would move in with her because she didn’t want to be alone and told me that I didn’t have to pay rent. I had just lost my full-time job and was making very little money. It was a four-bedroom house so there was plenty of room and I chipped in on the utilities.

I just think that at some point, if you keep getting disappointed by people letting you down, that’s probably on you. I’m getting to the point where my family can no longer hurt me because I’ve just put up a wall, which I hate, but I’m tired of being disappointed in them.

How would you handle this? Am I being too harsh about the whole restaurant thing and the fact that people, some of them without good reason, are just canceling on our plans?