When a parent cheats, the damage doesn’t only impact their spouse; it ripples straight into the lives of their kids. For her, her dad’s affair was not only about the betrayal of her mom, but it was also about him prioritizing someone else above her, too, and acting like she didn’t matter. Now, after years of feeling deserted, he expects her to step in and care about the homewrecker who tore her family apart.
This 16-year-old girl’s dad cheated on her mom with a woman named Lou for four or five years straight before the affair came to light.
Lou was actually engaged to another man throughout the affair, and then Lou got pregnant with her dad’s baby. Only then did Lou and her dad decide to tell her mom and Lou’s fiancé.
But then it turned out that her dad was not the baby daddy. Lou’s fiancé bailed on the baby and Lou, so her dad then adopted Lou’s child and stepped in as a parent. It’s easy to see why she and her 19-year-old brother dislike their dad.
“He chose her over us a lot during the affair because, [at] times, he said he’d come to my shows or my brother’s games, he would miss them,” she explained.
“He wasn’t around on weekends to see us either. He covered by saying he was working extra hours now and needed to because things were getting so expensive. Mom believed him, too. It sucked at the time, not having him there, and even for our birthdays, he was a no-show those years.”
“It was worse when we found out why. He didn’t just hurt Mom, but he abandoned us for someone else. I think the two of them are [horrible] to do stuff like that, and I called them both that to their faces before, which my dad didn’t like.”
She hates having to go to her dad’s house every other weekend, but that’s going to keep happening until she hits 18, since the court refuses to change the custody schedule.
The judge threatened her mom with potential jail time and loss of custody if her mom failed to force her to go to her dad’s house. Yikes. Her dad did call the police on her brother once when he said he didn’t want to go to his place.
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She did end up having to attend family therapy with her dad and Lou, where she announced that she would never consider them to be her family members, and she is planning on cutting them out of her life one day. She stays away from Lou’s child, and she is not nice to her dad or Lou.
“Lou has epilepsy, and she’s pregnant, and there have been some issues since she got pregnant this time, and she had to stop working and take it easy, and they have a nurse that checks on her, and Dad calls,” she added.
“But dad said the nurse [doesn’t] come often enough for him, and he wants me to check on Lou and make sure she’s okay, and I refuse to do it. On mom’s time, he can’t make me, but even on his time, I just stay out after school.”
“My dad told me it was dangerous to have nobody checking on her, and I told him I didn’t care, and he was asking the wrong person to care. My dad said I can hate them, but should want them alive and healthy.”
So, she and her brother don’t go, and she’s left wondering if that makes her a jerk.
She’s a kid being asked to carry her dad’s mess, and that’s incredibly unfair. If Lou needs care, that’s on her dad to arrange, not dump it on her when she’s still reeling from years of their backstabbing ways. She shouldn’t let her dad guilt her into believing she owes them compassion, because she owes them nothing.
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
