Some wounds run deep. And if the pain is suffered as a child, those memories are formative experiences that dictate so much of a person’s ongoing outlook about the people and relationships in their life.
That can create some difficult challenges to navigating family dynamics as an adult. Add kids of your own into the mix, and the complexity only grows.
One Redditor, known as EntertainmentOwn1116 on the site, found herself knee deep in those complications recently. She outlined the experience in a post to the “Am I the A**hole (AITA)” subReddit.
The Original Poster (OP) set the tone with the post’s title:
“AITA for telling my estranged father that he and his wife can be grandparents to his other kids future children?
First, OP offered some key backstory.
“My parents divorced when I was 15 because my dad had been cheating on my mom with a co-worker of hers. My younger brother was 13 and my sister was 12. I became estranged from him around that time.”
“My siblings followed suit. My full siblings anyway. I have two half siblings who are older than me and my other siblings. They were jerks to us because we were angry our dad hurt our mom, etc. And they made it clear if we didn’t want our dad they didn’t want us.”
“So ever since I consider him my estranged father and not even my dad.”
Then OP jumped to present day, and how it all shook out.
“I am now married and I have two little boys. I only see my father and his wife once every three years or so when there’s a paternal family event of some kind.”
“Last year there was a milestone birthday for my grandpa and throughout the day people went to see him. When I was leaving my father showed up and he saw that I had kids.”
“After that he tracked me down on social media and started saying how he and his wife would love to be grandparents and how she was unable to have kids, so no bio grandkids and all that stuff.”
“I replied once and told him that he could ask his other kids if she could be grandma to their future kids because they were not welcome in my life or the life of my kids. He responded several more times but I just ignored him.”
OP now was forced to navigate contact with her father.
“He then decided to get my great-aunt involved and say that my boys deserve to have more loving grandparents if they grandparents are willing and that I made his wife cry when I wrote what I did and I was insensitive.”
“My reply was she was insensitive to sleep with a married man with three children but apparently that was no big deal.”
“And it goes beyond that. To how she treated my mom at work while the affair was happening. She even got fired over it because she was bullying another colleague of my moms too.
OP felt all-but certain about where she stood, so she roped in the Reddit community.
“It’s not the type of family I want around my kiddos.”
“They’ll be fine with a loving grandma from me and two loving grandpa’s from their dad.”
“So tell me AITA for what I said?”
The anonymous strangers of Reddit weighed in by declaring:
- NTA – Not The A**hole
- YTA – You’re The A**hole
- ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
- NAH – No A**holes Here
Most Redditors sided with OP.
Many felt her father’s old behavior was the long and short of it.