My dad practically gave me up to his sister from the moment I (27M) was born. My mom passed when she was giving birth to me. And my aunt told me he never recovered from that because he blamed me for that.
It hurt a lot as a kid that at family events he would ignore my existence. When I was a little older he can’t stand to look at my face. You can imagine the amount of therapy that put me in. I used to go to church crying.
That’s how much his words hurt me. But the sh**ty part was that I never stopped trying to be accepted by him. After my high school graduation, he told me to never bother him again since he legally has no obligation to me anymore (since he was sending my aunt money to take care of me). Around that time is when I finally started accepting that reality so from there we moved on with our lives.
My aunt doesn’t talk to me about him. Sometimes my grandparents do and that’s how I found out he got married. They were mad he didn’t invite me to their wedding but to me, it didn’t matter because we were not close. But it was his wife who wanted to meet me. It’s the first time ever that he wants to make contact and it was too pretty much say she wants me in their life.
He asked me not to say anything because she doesn’t know the real reason we’re estranged, and maybe this could be an opportunity to reconnect after all. He was only doing it for her, though. When we spoke, it was evident that this was the case. Despite the fact that I never stated that I would be, he urged that we meet at their home because she was eager to meet me. She believes we became alienated because we didn’t get along in my teenage years, went to college.
It irritated me that he pretended we weren’t conversing for minor reasons while the real cause had harmed me for years. I was honest with her. He said everything to me. It was all my aunt’s fault that he was never a parent to me. It came as a complete surprise to her. The end result was a disaster. This has now been widely publicized. My grandmother, in particular, expressed her understanding of my rage. But this was his last chance to find someone.
My dad is devastated. They think it was going too far to ruin his marriage that way when he was willing to include me in their lives which could have been the start of our relationship. And they say not only did I ruin that but also possibly wrecked his marriage. She just doesn’t agree at all with what he did and it could’ve been avoided if I didn’t say anything.
For me it was hard not to tell the truth after the lies made it seem like it was nothing serious. I couldn’t ignore what happened after what it did. Idk if it was the right call since it put their whole marriage at risk after all.