agonyaunt | (no subject)

(no subject)

Dear Care and Feeding,

My older half-sister never forgave our dad for having the audacity to remarry and have me. Her parents divorced when she was a baby; we are nine years apart.

I have vivid memories of her pinching me and pulling my hair when I was small. I used to hide in my parents’ room when she came over. I remember being 10 and screaming at our father that my “sister” wished my mother and I were dead, that she thought the world would be better off for it. My parents would later excuse my sister’s behavior as the result of her mother’s mental illness and abusiveness to her. Well, apparently that runs in the family. My half-sister spent my teens and early 20s doing a lot of drugs; she spent some time in prison. The only time she seemed to want anything to do with us was when she wanted to try and weasel money out of our father. The stress nearly ended my parents’ marriage.

Now it seems that she has sobered up and found God. She has been talking to our father and he is very eager to “make us a real family finally.” I don’t want her in my life. I don’t want to have anything to do with her. She is a stranger who happens to share some of my DNA. I love my father, but his other daughter had years and years to make any moves toward being my sister. That ship has sailed and sunk. How do I tell him that when he wants so badly for me to be a part of his repaired relationship with her?

—Only Child

Dear Child,

If you don’t want to have anything to do with her, you don’t have to. You can tell your father that you can’t forgive her, that your past with her is just too painful, and that your childhood was profoundly affected by her rage. You can mention that you hope he’ll understand.

But I’m wondering whether, for your own sake as much as your father’s and sister’s, you might search for some forgiveness. The rage you’re carrying is a source of pain for you, and forgiveness (as it’s often been said) is a gift to the forgiver far more than to the one forgiven. It can free you from “the corrosive anger” that is doing you harm. You note that your parents “excused” your sister’s bad behavior by pointing to her mother’s mental illness and the abuse she suffered at her hands. That’s not an excuse; it’s a reason. Although recognizing what your sister was contending with—and allowing yourself to consider what it might have felt like for her to visit her father in his new home, with his new family (and especially his new daughter, whom she might well have thought of as her replacement daughter), then returning to her troubled home—doesn’t mean you have to invite her into your life if doing so would cause you further pain, I promise you that opening your mind to the possibility that she isn’t evil will do you more good than harm. Again, you don’t have to see her or talk to her if you don’t want to: That’s your choice and no one else’s. Whether she has truly changed (and people can, and do) or not is, in many ways, beside the point. The point is: Do you want to hold on to these bitter feeling forever? Wouldn’t it be nice to be able to let them go?

—Michelle

Link

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only

So let me get this straight. This man knew his daughter was living with an abusive and mentally ill mother, and... he just let that happen? He had eight years between divorcing her mother and having his second child, and at no point in that near-decade did he think "Wow, this is messed up, I should go to court and try for more custody"?

He failed to protect his first daughter from her mother, he failed to protect his second daughter from her half-sister - this is what LW should tell him. Because he is the problem here. I hope LW can find some tiny shred of her that can say, sincerely, "I'm glad my half-sister is doing better and I hope that this continues", but even more than that I really want her to look around and smell the bullshit. Why is she worried about his feelings? How dare he ask her to put his feelings before her own, when he never put the welfare of either of his children first, second, or anywhere on the list?

Yuuuuup all of this. This letter made me angry too, but in the other direction! I suspect LW is protecting herself from this realization because blaming her father would be painful for her, but... reality is knocking on the door now.

I'm not excusing the dad here, but a lot of men this doesn't occur to because of incredibly stupid societal structures. The default "joint custody" arrangement usually isn't even a 50/50 split, and everything's already rough enough and expensive enough, and non-asshole guys don't want to be That Guy who keeps dragging their ex-wife back into court, so they accept the default 2-weekends-a-month and don't revisit it because a good guy wouldn't put his ex or his kid through the stress of all that, etc. etc.

My one brother's now-wife had to make spreadsheets to convince him it wasn't an asshole move to go for more official custody than he had, and to point out that he could have asked for a different arrangement in the first place -- he was startled because he thought the 2-weekends-a-month thing was set in stone and not negotiable because that's what all the divorced dads seemed to have, so he literally hadn't asked during divorce and custody negotiations.

This is a man with a master's degree. He's not uneducated. He just didn't know there was another option. And I'm not excusing him because he could have ASKED, or even said to his lawyer he wanted something different, or whatever -- but I also am aware of all the bullcrap societal things that meant it never occurred to him to ask. That make it a lot harder on a LOT of men to ask.

I think this dad should have asked, too! And should have done differently than he did! But I also think that it's very likely he didn't know he COULD, even if he knew he SHOULD. Possibly he was even told he couldn't -- I know my brother was directly told by other divorced dads that he couldn't expect more than default custody, that's just what's done.

Edited 2024-06-01 16:11 (UTC)

standing ovation

I agree that LW's father should have done more to protect LW from her half-sister, but we have no idea what the father did for his first daughter. He may have tried to fight for more custody. He may have succeeded! Or he may not—courts, at least in the US, often favor mothers. Either way, LW is silent on this topic, so we can only speculate about what the father did or did not do.

Or he may not—courts, at least in the US, often favor mothers.

Can you cite this?

I had the impression that what looks like "favoring mothers" is actually that many fathers don't want a large (or in some cases, any) proportion of custody. That said I cannot cite this either, yet. When I have a moment I'll do some research.

People say a lot that men generally get more custody if they ask for it. The last time I tried to look that up I couldn't confirm it, but admittedly I didn't google very hard. What I did find was that over 90% of child custody in divorce cases settle out of court - there's no need to bring a judge or lawyers in at all if both parents are able to sit in a room together for long enough to agree on a course of action. A lot of people don't even get anything in writing, though I think that is likely a mistake - even if everybody is 100% acting in good faith with no concerns other than the child's best interests and the plan is "We'll split it mostly halfway but keep up an ongoing discussion and change it with the child's input if that makes more sense" you should still write that down somewhere so you can both confirm that's what you said.

A friend of mine has struggled to extricate his son from a potentially abusive situation involving the mother’s second husband. Officially, the courts cannot consider the parents’ genders. In practice, my friend has had to fight a red-state system that still sees the mother as the primary parent despite a joint custody agreement.

But this is a digression. My main point was that we do not know what the father in the letter did or did not do for his first daughter. A lot of comments here are based on assumptions.

This is not a citation, it’s an anecdote.

I assume the father did not so much as call CPS on his ex because that is the behavior most consistent with the fact that he also did not protect his younger child from the older and now is invested in pretending they’re all one big happy family and bygones are bygones.

The real bad actors here are the parents! Michelle is off on exactly the same misdirection/detour as the LW.

I like what other commenters have said about the parents, but also I for one am really tired of this whole thing of "forgiveness will heal you."

I really don't buy that.

There is a difference between forgiveness and letting go. There is a difference between forgiveness and understanding what the other person went through.

I'm all about letting go and moving on, which this LW seems to have done.

Well said indeed.

I mean, I will never forgive my second husband for the stuff he did, but it all happened well over 30 years ago and I have totally moved on. I barely think about him now.

Yes, too many people are trying to make "forgiveness" mean too many things -- but inconsistently. "You have to forgive me for your own sake! It's not healthy for you if you don't forgive me! Oh, you say you forgive me? Great, problem solved, no apologies or amends needed on my part!"

"Forgiveness will heal you" is imposed Christianity under another name. It makes me very angry.

I am livid at the huge long-ass paragraph lecturing LW to “search for forgiveness.” Forgiveness is not lost in the couch cushions. Letting something go often requires a long period of time of not having it rubbed in your face. She clearly wants that time. The suggestion that she should actively work on creating forgiveness in herself is the opposite of that.

And “That’s not an excuse, it’s a reason?” How incredibly dismissive of LW’s experience.

Letting something go often requires a long period of time of not having it rubbed in your face.

YES THIS. The "but forgiveness!!!" harassers really salt the earth themselves with their insistence that you process shit on THEIR timeline, on THEIR terms, with THEIR desired result.

(I have asked people who were very "concerned" about my capacity for forgiveness, out of curiosity, if they spent nearly as much effort haranguing abusers about taking responsibility and/or respecting boundaries. Never got an answer on that, which I think was an answer in itself.)

Flat | Top-Level Comments Only