One of life’s greatest joys is the bond between a father and his daughter. Her father will always be there to encourage and love her, regardless where she goes in life. But that’s not always the case. Read the story to know how this father daughter relationship was and what do you think the daughter should do?
Source: Reddit
My (24F) mom died when I was 7 from leukemia. I have very few memories of her from before she was sick and I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her in her last year but she was an artist and until she couldn’t anymore she would make me little collages when she was in the hospital with drawings and photos and messages for me. My grandmother put them all in a book for me after she died. I wanted to be like my mom and my counselor thought it would help, so I started a journal where I would do kind of a similar thing and I’ve done at least one page a week all these years ever since my mom died, more when I miss her or have something hard going on. So, I have kind of a unique record of my mental state over the last 16 years.
My father remarried when I was 9. My step-mother really leaned hard into the “I’m your mom now” and my father didn’t stop her. It improved when they had my half-brother because she basically forgot about me then. Unfortunately he got cancer when he was 3. And I pretty much ceased to exist for my father, he was either working or gone with my brother and I spent all my teen years mostly at home alone or with my grandparents. The mantra was that my brother needed to be the focus because he might die so I needed to not be selfish since I was healthy. I stopped trying to talk to him when I was 16 and it was a dark time. I moved out when I was 18 and cut them off completely.
My grandparents let me know that my brother died a couple of years ago but respected my desire to remain NC with my father. He recently reached out to them because he wants to see me and talk. I went through my old journals and made him a PowerPoint with images of the entries where I had talked about being frustrated and feeling abandoned and unwanted, some with literal quotes of things my dad had said to me during arguments. Even the really dark stuff from when I was seriously depressed. Then I ended it with a photo of one of my mom’s collages where she had written “Remember that your dad and I are always here for you” and I wrote “You failed. Go away.” underneath. I felt like him being able to see it from my literal perspective would communicate why I don’t want him back better than I could.
Evidently it worked, but a little too well because I’ve been bombarded by family telling me that it’s understandable that I don’t want to see him, but what I sent gutted him and he’s completely fallen apart after reading through it and it was unnecessarily cruel.
Maybe it was, I know my bar for that is kind of weird sometimes, so did I go too far here?
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