They say time heals all wounds, but for some, it only deepens the exhaustion of being ignored. After her dad consistently chose his mistress-turned-wife over her, and this woman left him for another man, she decided she was done playing the role of the bigger person.
She’s now being labeled heartless by her family for how she reacted to the news, so she’s not sure if she did kick a man while he was down, or if she finally was right to call her dad out for failing to stand up for her.
This 27-year-old woman has spent the majority of her life being accused of acting in an overly sensitive way. People tell her that she’s severely unforgiving and over the top.
She wants you to know this, as it complicated the situation with her dad, because she can’t tell whether she is being inhumanely savage with him or simply setting standards.
Now, her mom and dad got divorced when she was 16, and she knew the reason why before her mom even filled her in on it.
“I saw some messages on my dad’s phone that I was not supposed to see. I never told anyone that I saw them. When my mother told me that my father had been having an affair with a woman for two years, I had to pretend to be surprised,” she explained.
She’s horrible at pretending. Anyway, Diane is the woman her dad had the affair with, and Diane moved in with her dad four months after her parents got separated.
She and her younger brother (they are three years apart) had to show up at their dad’s house every single weekend while accepting that Diane was living alongside him.
Her brother adapted to the changes better than she did. It was difficult to come to terms with Diane, even though Diane was not outright cruel to her.
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Diane’s approach was understated. Diane decorated her dad’s house and made sure to eliminate all traces of them. Diane referred to her dad with a nickname she and her brother hadn’t heard of.
“It was like she was trying to separate his identity with her from his identity with us. She made comments about my mother. She would take them back when my dad looked uncomfortable. These were things, but they happened consistently,” she added.
“When I was 17 years old, I told my dad that Diane made me uncomfortable. I also told him that some of the things she said about my mother bothered me.”
“He told me that I needed to give her a chance and that I was being unfair to someone who was trying hard. That was the time he said something like that to me. I told him again when I was 19 years old. Diane had uninvited me from a family vacation that my dad had planned for him and his kids.”
Diane made it for just the two of them at the last minute, and her dad allowed it. Her brother was the one who told her. Later on, her dad called to say that he hoped she could understand.
She replied that she didn’t and could see a pattern. Her dad characterized her as overdramatic. Similar incidents happened as the years went by.
Upon graduating from college, Diane squeezed herself into all of the photos, and her dad was silent about it. Next, her best friend got married, and her dad missed it because Diane took them on a trip that weekend, and it seemed intentional to her.
“At Christmas one year, Diane told my dad that she was not comfortable having my mother’s family members at dinner. My dad uninvited my grandmother, [whom] he had known for 30 years, because Diane asked him to,” she said.
“Each time something like that happened, I said something to my dad. Each time, he told me that I was being too sensitive or that Diane was trying hard. He told me that I needed to be the person. When I was 23 years old, I pulled back from my dad.”
“I stopped making an effort to attend events where I knew the dynamic would be the same. My dad and I went from talking every week to talking once a month. He noticed the change. When he brought it up, I told him that I loved him. However, I was not willing to keep showing up to be an afterthought in his life while Diane came first every time.”
Her dad stated she wasn’t being fair to him. She responded that she had spent six years telling him the exact same thing, and there was no change on his end, so she was exhausted.
Her dad told her she had to try harder. Well, three months ago, her dad called her up in tears. Apparently, Diane had been cheating on him for over a year and left him for the other man.
This was certainly something her dad never anticipated would happen to him. She sat there and mulled over all the times she had informed her dad that she felt like a guest in his home.
She thought back to the graduation photos, the problematic vacation, and her grandma being excluded from Christmas. She replayed each time her dad told her she wasn’t trying hard enough and was being a drama queen.
“I told my dad that I was sorry he was hurting. I meant it. I am not a person. Then I told him that I had spent ten years telling him that something was wrong, and he had chosen not to listen every single time. I told him that I could not pretend to be surprised by any of this,” she continued.
“He told me that what I said was a thing to say to someone who was devastated. Maybe it was. My brother thinks I went [too] far. My mother told me that she understood. That kicking someone when they are down is not who I am. Two of my dad’s siblings have called me cold and unfeeling.”
“I have spent ten years being told that my feelings were wrong. Ten years of watching my dad choose someone who consistently made me feel invisible. In the one moment where he finally needed something from me, I was supposed to just absorb all of that and offer comfort with no acknowledgment of any of it?”
She does wonder if she should have waited to be so honest with her dad. There could have been a better time to tell him about her feelings.
It has occurred to her that what she admitted was the wrong thing to say. It didn’t bring her any joy. She said it with a decade of weariness behind it.
In the end, she meant what she said, and she’s not convinced that she’s sorry for doing it. She’s left wondering if she’s mean for what she told her dad.
Her dad spent years dismissing her and allowing Diane to be disrespectful, so she was right to call him out and say she told him so.
I can’t believe her dad tossed her to the side, prioritized Diane over her, and then wanted her to be his shoulder to cry on when Diane ditched him.
Her dad messed up big time and can’t face the consequences of that, which isn’t her problem or her fault.
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
