Imagine growing up with just your dad after your mom dies, but then he remarries and everything changes.

Would you be open to accepting your stepmom as your new mom, or would you resent your dad if he tried to push you to forget you mom?

In this story, one teenage boy is in this situation, and he resents his dad. Therapy didn’t help and only brought to light more hurt feelings.

Let’s read the whole story.

AITA for telling my dad his choices made me see remarrying after a partner dies as a bad thing?

My mom died when I (17m) was 5. My dad remarried when I was 7. There was a big difference in dad before he met his wife and after.

Before he had a few photos of mom in our house, he talked about her with me, he brought me to her grave and celebrated her birthday with me.

After he met his wife, and they married after 5 months of knowing each other, the photos were taken down and given away along with anything that was mom’. All her cookbooks, all her jewelry and stuff.

It went mostly to my grandparents house but dad gave some stuff to his friends for their wives.

This would be so sad. It’s like him mom is forgotten.

He never talked about mom after his wife moved in.

We didn’t celebrate her birthday and him and his wife told me it made the wife feel left out if we did it so we needed to stop.

Same thing with visiting her grave.

It was a few months after he got remarried and I was upset and angry and told him it was like he forgot mom.

No, he didn’t have to.

And he said he had to. He said remarrying means you need to be all in with the new person and they need to take center stage. He told me it would be good for me to do the same because his wife was my mom now too.

I heard his wife say after that she was glad he added the part about me because she felt like I wanted to put mom between us and she hated it.

We’ve had a strained and kind of toxic relationship ever since.

I completely understand his feelings.

I resent him and I think his way of moving on was unfair to me and unfair to the love he says he felt for mom. I feel like he disrespects both of us by forgetting her like that because she loved him, she was his wife and she’s not even allowed to be a memory.

And for me there is no me without mom.

There’s also no new mom or second mom. There’s only ever one mom and I care more about remembering her than his wife or respecting her feelings, which I think make a bad combo for a widower with a kid but anyway.

You can’t force someone to forget their mom.

My dad gets annoyed with me for not listening to him and forgetting mom and loving his wife like he wants me to. He tells me to get over it twice a month and sometimes more.

He’s gone through my room and told me if I had anything of mom’s in there it had to go.

He wrote cards to his wife from me that called her mom and told me I don’t get to use just her name because she’s been mothering me since I was 7.

His dad finally suggests therapy.

Dad saw me planning to leave his house in January when I turn 18 and he decided we needed therapy and he said we had some things we needed to talk out.

For him that meant needing to talk it out over his wife and how I disrespect his remarriage and he told me he saw an assignment I never handed in for debate homework where I argued on why remarrying is the wrong choice to make.

He said it was a selfish view and saying that remarrying replaces dead loved ones and kids parents and that kids deserve better than remarriage is such an awful thing to wish on a parent. He ranted about it and showed the teacher the printout he made.

He kept that for 11 months without saying or doing anything with it until that session. He said it was disturbing that his kid who gained a wonderful mom out a remarriage would suggest it’s wrong to remarry and parents should die alone because reasons.

I’m glad the therapist shut the dad down.

The therapist had to make him shut up and she told dad if he refused to listen then therapy wasn’t for him and we should leave. She said this because he kept trying to talk over her and stop me from talking by doing all the talking.

He gave in and shut up.

Then I told him my views in that were shaped by his choices. His choice in words and actions and he showed me the worst of remarriage. I told him his wife was the second worst thing to happen to me after losing mom because he met her and he changed and he made me see all of the ugly and none of the possible good there could be.

I told him I didn’t even use that as homework and that I wrote it after another lecture from him about his wife and it was a lot like a journal entry that I forgot about after I wrote it. But I told him he had shaped remarriage as negative for me and I would always look at him as the worst type to remarry because he disrespected mom and me in the process.

It seems like his dad expected therapy to go quite a bit differently.

Dad spent days after the session telling me I was wrong to blame him or to put my views on him.

So I emailed the therapist about him doing that and she reached out to him and we never went back.

And he’s still mad and told me I’m such a narrow minded child who only cares about myself and mom.

I told him since he refused to care I had to.

AITA?

Telling a child to forget their mom and accept their stepmom as their new mom is a horrible idea.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

His dad may never truly listen to him.

Here’s a suggestion of what to tell his dad.

This person calls the dad “an utter disgrace.”

He deserved so much better.

He has basically lost both of his parents.

If you thought that was an interesting story, check out what happened when a family gave their in-laws a free place to stay in exchange for babysitting, but things changed when they don’t hold up their end of the bargain.