Mom Says She Is Willing To ‘Lose’ Her Daughters After They Refuse To Attend Her Wedding Because It Will ‘Ruin’ Their Dad
"I am okay letting them go… I could tell them everything their father has done but I don’t feel like blowing up their image of him."
fizkes / Shutterstock.com Weddings often bring out the best in us, but all too often, they also bring out the worst in our families. For one woman online, her remarriage is threatening to rip her family in half, starting with her relationship with her daughters.
This mom's daughters are refusing to attend her wedding because of how it will affect their dad.
Divorced parents remarrying is often a bumpy transition in families, but for one mom on Reddit, her wedding is laden with baggage. Her daughters' refusal to attend her nuptials has resulted in an ultimatum: If you don't come to my wedding, I'm not coming to yours.
Her daughters are being less than understanding and choosing to protect their father's feelings above all else. But you can't really blame them — they've been witness to some harrowing moments in their father's life.
The father has had multiple mental health episodes, which the daughters blame their mom for.
The mom writes that she and her husband divorced when their daughters were 14 and 10, and after filing, "he ended up spiraling and the kids were exposed to that." She quickly became the bad guy — "I was blamed for ruining dad," she writes.
Her ex-husband recovered, but then had another episode when she began dating. Here again, she was blamed for her ex-husband's breakdown. The mom was forced to hide her dating life from her kids and keep it quiet on social media because they issued a rule that she was not allowed to date in order to protect their dad.
"It was an awful time since, to the kids, I was still responsible for what he did and reacted to things," she shares.
That worked for years — until a few months ago when her boyfriend proposed. Her daughters, who are now 25 and 21, were immediately angry that she was once again going to hurt their father. After a long talk, she thought that it was worked out. One of her daughters even agreed to play the piano at the wedding.
Then everything changed. "I got a text from all the kids saying they will not be at my wedding, that they need to support [their] dad during this time," she explains.
After years of this, the mom finally issued an ultimatum: "If they do not go to my wedding it will damage our relationship and I will not be attending their own weddings when they get married," she writes.
The mom is refusing to give in and has decided she is 'okay letting them go,' if that's how it must be.
"I sent a text [that] it is up to them if they go or not," she writes. "If they do go I have hope to fix this relationship, if not I’m just done. I can’t keep playing this game."
The situation is complicated by the fact that her marriage to their father was incredibly toxic. She writes that he was unreliable, often bailed on taking care of their children and never helped her with anything.
At other Redditors' suggestion, she made one last attempt to mend fences with her daughters — by spilling all the beans. Everything that went on in her marriage. All the ways their father failed her and mistreated her. Her daughters didn't believe a word of it. "They called me a liar," she writes. "I think it is over."
This family displays some common themes among families with a mentally ill parent.
In some ways, this scenario is not surprising — parental mental illness frequently impairs children's emotional development and often strains parent-child relationships.
Psychologists have found that an inability to discern between the direct effects of mental illness, like their father's breakdown, and the indirect effects, like their mother divorcing him, is not uncommon within families with parental mental illness.
Even more common are attachment issues and the children's inability to differentiate themselves from their parents — a crucial part of the process in which a child develops his or her own identity. Psychologists think this is due to their ill parent's crises depriving them of key development experiences.
Studies have also shown that it is often not until children of mentally ill parents have children of their own that they are finally able to repair their relationship with their own parents. Hopefully, it won't take that long for this family.
John Sundholm is a news and entertainment writer who covers pop culture, social justice and human interest topics.