👫 My sister and I keep quietly competing over who does more for our parents

My sister lives about twenty minutes from our parents' house, I live almost two hours away because of work, and over the past year I have noticed a strange, mostly unspoken competition building between us over who is actually doing more for them as they get older. She handles most of the day to day things, doctor visits, groceries, sitting with our mother during her knee physiotherapy sessions twice a week, simply because proximity makes that easier for her than it would be for me. I try to make up for the distance by handling most of the bigger financial decisions, coordinating with specialists when something more serious comes up, and driving down every second weekend without fail regardless of how tired I am from the work week itself. Neither of us has ever directly said the words "I do more than you," but it shows up in smaller comments, her mentioning how long she waited at a hospital alone, me mentioning how much a particular treatment actually costs and who is covering it. Our mother, without meaning to, sometimes makes it worse by praising one of us to the other in a way that clearly was not intended as a comparison but lands exactly like one anyway. She will tell me how wonderful my sister was during a recent scare, and even though I know she means it purely as gratitude, some small part of me immediately starts calculating my own version of contribution in response. I genuinely do not think either of us is doing this on purpose or even fully consciously, we both actually care about our parents a great deal, but the quiet scorekeeping between siblings feels like it is slowly turning something that should be shared care into something closer to a competition neither of us signed up for. Has anyone else navigated caregiving responsibilities split unevenly by distance or circumstance with a sibling, and did the quiet comparison ever actually fade, or does it just become a permanent undertone to how you two interact?

My sister and I fell into this same pattern after our father's stroke a few years back, distance meant she handled daily visits while I managed hospital bills and specialists from another city entirely. What actually helped was one blunt conversation naming the scorekeeping directly instead of letting it stay unspoken, awkward for about ten minutes and considerably easier after that one talk happened between the two of us.