It’s always interesting to me when a parent’s version of reality just doesn’t fit the truth. How would you feel if you lost a parent, only to have your surviving parent push their new spouse on you as some kind of replacement to fill the void, but they made excuses as to why you weren’t cool with it?
This 21-year-old man has two sisters who are 20 and 18, and when they were little, they sadly lost their dad. As for their 55-year-old mom, following three years of being single, she got married to a 61-year-old guy.
From that moment on, their relationship with their mom drastically changed, and she is blaming it on all of them not wanting her to get married for a second time. His mom also says none of them can stand seeing her happy with another man, but that’s not the case.
“The problem was she had an expectation that we would turn into the family we were before. She thought her husband would be our new dad, and we would want him involved in everything,” he explained.
“She thought we’d only celebrate him on Father’s Day, that we would want him there for our medical appointments, that we would invite him to anything we were involved in that could include a dad, and she thought we would call him dad and call them together our parents.”
“She was always asking me why I didn’t ask her husband something that she felt was guy stuff, and I would have asked Dad if he were alive. She’d pressure my sisters to go to father/daughter dances with her husband.”
In art class at school, he and his sisters would make crafts to put on their dad’s grave, and his mom got upset that they didn’t make things for her husband instead. Or she would try to make them change their artwork to give to her husband.
On the day he didn’t want to go to a father/son charity football game with his mom’s new husband, that really made her mad, and she couldn’t understand why he wanted to stay home.
He tried to tell his mom his dad was the only person he wanted to do something like that with, but she still didn’t get it: her forcing her husband on them as a replacement for their dad wasn’t working.
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Consequently, he and his sisters have pulled away from their mom and moved out of the house ASAP. His little sister just left three months ago, as soon as she celebrated her 18th birthday.
“It was after that my mom started to cry whenever she’d call and ask what happened to us, and she’d talk about [how] much our relationship has changed since she remarried,” he continued.
“She has told me she hates it. She also dominates when the topic comes up, and I have been silent because I don’t know how to explain this to her without it becoming a bigger deal.”
“I hate that she feels like we judge her for remarrying, but I also don’t know how to tell her that this distance is because of how she pushed him onto us. I feel like she won’t see the issue we have with it, and that maybe she’ll try to push back. But I have noticed, as have my sisters, that her thinking we rejected her for finding someone after dad is really messing with her.”
He’s left wondering how he can tell his mom the truth about why he and his sisters aren’t close to her anymore. His sisters think he should try since he’s the oldest, but it’s weighing on him that she definitely won’t like what he says.
He really just needs to come out and say it without worrying about how his mom will receive the news, since it’s not going to go well at all.
But at least his mom will know the truth; then it’s up to her if she wants to accept it or not. He literally just has to say the only problem he has with his mom’s husband is that she tried to make him a replacement for his dad. That’s it.
What advice do you have for him?
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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
