Auntie SparkNotes: My Dad Dated Too Soon After My Mom’s Death
Dear Auntie,
A few years ago, my mom died. It was a really awful, difficult time for my entire family, but enough time has passed that I’m relatively okay now.
However, that entire first year was really hard to get through, and something that added to the hurt was that my dad started dating again only ten months after my mom died. My younger sister and I were really upset when we found out. She found out first and started crying and yelling after he told her, and when I found out and expressed that I was also upset, my dad said that he had “expected me to be more mature about it.” I tried to tell him, in what I thought was a very calm, mature way, that my sister and I weren’t ready yet. That our mom had been gone for less than a year and we were still getting used to her not being there and that him dating so soon was making this process even harder for us, and that we both felt he should have taken our feelings into consideration before he started dating again. His response was that we were “being selfish” and that he thought “we would want him to be happy.” I always thought this was an incredibly selfish thing for my dad to say to my sister and I, and it always frustrated me that he couldn’t seem to understand why we were upset, even though relatives and family friends who knew about the situation completely understood how my sister and I felt and told us that were justified in feeling the way we did.
To make a long story short, my dad’s girlfriend eventually broke up with him because my sister and I were very openly hostile to her and made it very clear we didn’t want her around. I realize now we shouldn’t have been as mean as we were to her, but we were also very hurt and angry. After my dad’s girlfriend broke up with him, he basically exploded at my sister and I and told us that it was our fault she dumped him and that we were incredibly selfish people who didn’t want him to be happy.
This was years ago, and my dad currently has a different girlfriend. I’m fine with him dating now, and his new girlfriend is nice enough, but I still can’t get over how he first acted when he started again. What’s even worse is that, in the few times it has come up since, he doesn’t think he did anything wrong. There’s been no apologizing, no “You we were right, I should have taken your feelings into consideration and waited,” no “I shouldn’t have called you selfish.” He still views the situation like me and my sister were in the wrong and we were just acting like spoiled brats who wanted to ruin his relationship for no reason. Even though this happened a long time ago, I still resent my dad for what happened. Do you have any advice about how to move past this?
I’m so sorry about your mom, Sparkler.
And when it comes to moving past your dad’s behavior in the aftermath of her death, I do indeed have some advice… but I don’t think you’re going to like it.
Because here’s the thing, sweet pea: your feelings about your dad dating again were valid, natural, and justifiable—but none of that makes you right, at least not in the kind of way you seem to think you were. And that’s because “right” is a useless framework to try to apply to something as messy as grief; people deal with it in different ways, on different schedules, and there is less than nothing to be gained by policing someone else’s response to a tragedy. Nobody is at their best when they’ve just had their life ripped apart, or someone they loved ripped away from them.
Which is something you seem to realize, in reference to your own feelings and to the way you treated your dad’s girlfriend at the time. You were young, you’d suffered a terrible loss, and you lashed out in a way that’s totally unsurprising given the circumstances—or, in your own words, “I realize now we shouldn’t have been as mean as we were to her, but we were also very hurt and angry.”
And look: in a perfect world, your dad would have set aside his own hurt and anger and disappointment and fear and whatever else he was feeling in order to empathize with you and your sister after you effectively torpedoed his relationship. It goes without saying (but we’ll say it anyway) that his response left a lot to be desired, and that as the parent in this scenario, he had the greater responsibility to be selfless and make sacrifices in that moment, his own happiness nonwithstanding. But because we don’t live in a perfect world, and because your dad is a person who had his own complex relationship with your mom and his own complex feelings about trying to live in a world without her in it, it’s not a shock that he made some mistakes in trying to cope with what was probably the worst thing that had ever happened to him. And if you deserve a pass for your less-than-ideal reaction because you were in pain, then it might be time to consider that perhaps your father deserves similar consideration.
Which brings me to this: you don’t have to think that your dad was right to behave the way he did. But in the context of everything he’s ever said or done as a parent, does this one moment deserve such significance? Does it really belong on the highlight reel? Or is it maybe time to bundle it up with all the millions of other things that made the year after your mom’s death so hard and terrible, and let it disappear into the overall jumble of awfulness?
Obviously, only you know if your dad’s reaction is representative of how he is as a parent overall, or if he just made one really crappy mistake under mitigating circumstances. But assuming that it’s the latter (and ironically, the way you’ve fixated on it suggests that his behavior here was really out of character, rather than a regular feature), then putting it in the appropriate context is how you let it go. You can believe he was wrong, and also simultaneously believe that a person doesn’t deserve to be resented forever for having been wrong. You can believe he was wrong, and also believe that his perspective on what happened all those years ago is understandably different than yours in ways you may never fully understand. You can believe he was wrong, and also believe that his character and your relationship shouldn’t be defined by a mistake he made at the worst time in all of your lives. And if you can find a way to believing all of that, you’ll find the kind of peace and forward motion you’re looking for.
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