Most kids would be heartbroken if their parents got a divorce. It takes time to heal.
Especially if one of their parents start dating right away.
Redditor Beneficial-Error4840 encountered this very issue with her step daughter. So she turned to the “Am I The A**hole” (AITA) subReddit for moral judgment.
She asked:
“AITA for telling my step daughter to leave the house after she called me a home wrecker?”
The Original Poster (OP) explained:
“My step daughter and I don’t have a good relationship.”
“I have been in her life since she was 9. Her father and I started dating three months after he filed for divorce.”
“We were colleagues for a short while about an year before their divorce but we didn’t have any relationship back then. I left the firm just 6 months after we started working together. I didn’t even think about him once till we reconnected at a party hosted by one our colleague.”
“His ex wife thinks that we had an affair with me. There is nothing we can do to convince her otherwise.”
“She told her daughter about her suspicions when she was around 13. We had a great relationship till then and I tried to tell her that her dad didn’t cheat.”
“She doesn’t believe us. It is just our words against her mother and the timeline does look a bit suspicious.”
OP’s step daughter started distancing herself.
“She withdraw from me and she has always been distant since then and sometimes she made some remarks about her father being a cheater and it was very hard on both of us.”
“It was something we tried to talk about but it was just our words against her mother’s and she truly believed it.”
“She returned home for summer break after her freshman year. She decided to spend most of the time with her mother but she does visit us a few times.”
“She visited us two days ago. She was in a remarkably bad mood. She was just stewing in silence and watching something on TV.”
“I asked her to turn the volume down as I was working.”
OP’s step daughter blew up.
“She blew up on me. She called me a home wrecker and a gold digger.”
“She accused me of ruining her parents’ marriage.”
“I was stunned and shocked and it hurt me. I knew she didn’t like me but she clearly hated me. I think her calling me a gold digger hurt the most.”
“I am at a stage of my career where I want to switch to something less stressful but one of the reasons I don’t is because we don’t want her to be burdened by debt.”
“I love this girl even if she didn’t care about me.”
OP asked her to giver her some space.
“I asked her to leave the house and come back when she could was a bit calmer. She left the house and she is not talking to her father.”
“He tried to talk to her and she is not speaking to him. I feel incredibly guilty. I should have handled it better. I got too emotional about it.”
“I really can’t blame her for believing what her mom told her. If my mom told me something similar about dad I would have believed it and I can’t blame her mother too.”
“If you believed that your spouse cheated wouldn’t you tell your children at some point? I let her words get to me and I may hurt my husband’s relationship with his her.”
“I feel guilty as hell. My husband also think that I should have been calmer here and just let her vent a bit before talking to her.”
“Edit : She is in college.”
Redditors gave their opinions on the situation by declaring:
- NTA – Not The A**hole
- YTA – You’re The A**hole
- NAH – No A**holes Here
- ESH – Everyone Sucks Here
Redditors argued there were no a**holes here.
“NAH, except for her mom.”
“That poor girl has been poisoned by her mother, but can you blame her? It’s her mom telling her that stuff. You can’t expect someone, who was thirteen at the time of being told, to be a detective to find out if it was the truth. I bet her heart was broken because she loves her dad.”
“But, I also don’t expect you to put up with it. You are innocent, even if the timeline is suspicious. You shouldn’t have to put up with verbal abuse from anybody. Maybe you could have handled it better, but you could’ve handled it a lot worse, too.” ~ daaaaanica
“The daughter is still the AH, regardless of what she believes.”
“She was in OP’s home (where she herself does not live) and disrespected her. If she is so adamant that her mother is telling the truth then she should see her father outside of OP’s home, or alternatively at least be civil whilst in OP’s home and in OP’s company.”
“No guest should ever disrespect the host in their own home- if they hate the host so much then they should leave.” ~ majesticjewnicorn
“Yup, at some point you have to acknowledge that she’s an adult and is not even attempting to hear the other side.”
“Her mom may have lit the fire but daughter is keeping it fueled.” ~ CanadianAnonymous
“She is barely even an adult. At max, she is nineteen years old if she’s a freshman in college.”
“Plus, just because she is an “adult” (hardly, it’s clear she’s still pretty dependent on her parents and is a teenager) doesn’t mean she gains tons of wisdom and can automatically wipe away the parental alienation inflicted by her mother, the lies her mother told that clearly traumatized her if this is how she’s acting, and believing that her father cheated on her mother and probably thinking it was her fault, which are all forms of trauma and abuse, by the way, especially since it’s gone on for 5/6 years.”
“On top of that, what about how traumatic the realization her mother was lying to her would be?”
“My mom has ACTUALLY cheated on my dad, and I’ve spent so many nights wondering if it was my fault. Imagine that she had spent those nights, like I have, without sleep wondering if she had done something wrong to make her dad cheat on her mom and just the fact that he did that in general, just to realize that all that grief, sadness, and sleepless nights over her dad was for nothing and the woman that she had clung onto for parental support after thinking her father was a disgusting man was really the bad one all along.” ~ daaaaanica
It’s heartbreaking.