Blending families is hard. Even if everyone has the same goal of getting along and loving each other, the hard fact is that for some people, those feelings never arrive.
OP’s father died when she was young and her mother remarried quickly.
I lost my dad when I was 6 to a heart attack. He was young but had a bad heart and died in his sleep when he was 29. My mom remarried a couple of years later.
She and her husband, my stepdad, met 7 months after my dad’s death. They started dating after knowing each other for a few months.
Then they got married. I should mention that they met through a grief support group. My mom’s husband lost a child to stillbirth and his relationship fell apart.
Even though she gets along with her stepdad, he’s never felt like a father figure.
My mom and her husband wanted me to look at him as another father in my life. I never saw him that way, not even when he and my mom had my half brother’s together.
I never hated my mom’s husband. I go through a lot of mixed feelings about him.
Sometimes I like him because I see he’s a good husband to my mom and a good dad to my half brothers.
Sometimes I dislike him for not respecting that I want to get along but do not want a fatherly relationship with him.
I have never loved him. He has never gotten to be someone I consider actually important to me.
It bothers her that he can’t accept that.
I think because throughout the negative has always outweighed the positive. What doesn’t help is he will often tell me he loves me but also goes into how he lost his bio daughter and that makes him love me more, and then he also brings up that losing my bio dad means I need someone else to fill that role.
He told me a young child who loses a parent cannot decide they never get a new one. They need to do their best to make the relationship as close to the original one as passible. I have asked him if it isn’t enough to just be friendly and on good terms.
My mom asked me before why I need to show more loyalty to my dad than to her and and her husband and why I can’t let him in enough to be that second dad so everyone else can be happy.
She told me she knows I would be happier if I had another person filling the role dad left behind. She said it doesn’t mean he replaces dad but it means I also have a dad here.
OP asked her mother to walk her down the aisle but her mother had other ideas.
Now that I’m in my 20s and I’m engaged to be married. I asked my mom if she would walk me down the aisle at my wedding and she freaked out and told me I needed to ask my stepdad. She told me that asking her would crush him.
Of course he walks in as she’s still being very loud and when he realized what was going on he told me it would mean the world to him to fill the father of the bride role, and do both parts of walking me down the aisle and performing a father/daughter dance at the wedding.
She agreed to what her mother wanted, after laying all of her cards on the table.
My mom pestered me about it for days afterward. So I asked if we could meet up and I told her I will give her what she wants but I need her to understand this is not for me, it’s not what I want, it’s not making me happy and it will not change how I feel about her husband, no matter how much she wants it to.
But I told her if it’s that important I will do it.
She called me manipulative for spewing all that before formally agreeing and told me I had managed to shit on my doing a good thing. AITA?
Is she a jerk for not just pretending the way they want her to?
Let’s find out!
The top comment says OP was nicer than she had to be.
None of this has ever been because they care about OP.
You can’t just force someone to forget a parent.
Say it with them: children are people.
They think the mom is being manipulative, not OP.
I feel like the more you try to force something like this, the harder kids resist.
OP’s parents don’t seem to have ever realized that, though.
If you enjoyed this story, check out this post about a daughter who invited herself to her parent’s 40th anniversary vacation for all the wrong reasons.