I Made a PowerPoint Presentation Explaining Exactly why I'll Never Forgive my Dad #shorts

[RedditRave]

If the story cuts off it's because this is a 60 second preview to the “FULL STORY”

The full story to this short is in the related shorts section. Most mobile users can see it. You will find it by the title of this short.

Or if you don’t mind reading, here’s the FULL STORY: My dad suddenly wants to have a relationship again. So I made a detailed PowerPoint presentation explaining exactly why I'll never forgive him. I don't regret it.


My (24 Female) mom died when I was 7 from leukemia. I have very few memories of her from before she was sick and I didn’t get to spend a lot of time with her in her last year, but she was an artist and until she couldn’t anymore she would make me little collages when she was in the hospital with drawings and photos and messages for me. My grandmother put them all in a book for me after she died. I wanted to be like my mom and my counselor thought it would help, so I started a journal where I would do kind of a similar thing and I’ve done at least one page a week all these years ever since my mom died, more so when I miss her or have something hard going on. So, I have kind of a unique record of my mental state over the last 16 years.


My father remarried when I was 9. My step-mother really leaned hard into the, “I’m your mom now” and my father didn’t stop her. It improved when they had my half-brother because she basically forgot about me then. Unfortunately he got cancer when he was 3. And I pretty much ceased to exist for my father, he was either working or gone with my brother and I spent all my teen years mostly at home alone or with my grandparents. The mantra was that my brother needed to be the focus because he might pass away so I needed to not be selfish since I was healthy. I stopped trying to talk to him when I was 16 and it was a dark time. I moved out when I was 18 and cut them off completely.


My grandparents let me know that my brother passed away a couple of years ago but respected my desire to remain no contact with my father. He recently reached out to them because he wants to see me and talk. I went through my old journals and made him a PowerPoint with images of the entries where I had talked about being frustrated and feeling abandoned and unwanted, some with literal quotes of things my dad had said to me during arguments. Even the really dark stuff from when I was seriously depressed. Then I ended it with a photo of one of my mom’s collages where she had written, “Remember that your dad and I are always here for you”, and I wrote “You failed. Go away.” underneath. I felt like him being able to see it from my literal perspective would communicate why I don’t want him back better than I could.


Evidently it worked, but a little too well because I’ve been bombarded by family telling me that it’s understandable that I don’t want to see him, but what I sent gutted him and he’s completely fallen apart after reading through it and it was unnecessarily cruel.


Maybe it was, I know my bar for that is kind of weird sometimes, so did I go too far?


Edit to add a couple things:


1. I loved my brother. I don’t resent him. He was a good kid and I wish he was still with us. None of this is his fault, to me it is completely my father’s and to a lesser extent step-mother’s. The parents prevented me from spending time with him as he got sicker so I wouldn’t have been allowed to be there for him even if I had been able to (which I wasn’t towards the end because I was also struggling to stay alive).


2. I have empathy. I understand what my father lost, I was there. I also lost those same people plus effectively my father. Even so, to me there is no excuse for completely shutting your own kid completely out of your life while also preventing them from getting any kind of help. I understand depression and freezing up, I’ve been there, and I still even not being an adult managed to consider the impact of my behavior on other people. If he was that bad off, he should have given me up to be raised by someone else. My mom’s parents asked and he wouldn’t agree to let me stay with them full time. I could have had a dad that was able to occasionally tell me he loved me even if it was just a text message. Alternatively, I could have lived with my grandparents and had people around me who cared about me every day even if that wasn’t my father. I got neither and every request for help of any kind was met with, “suck it up”. I can empathize with having to function while breaking down inside, but I can’t empathize with what he did.


3. I gather from relatives (who have backed off after some hard boundary setting) that my father and step-mother split not long ago and are in divorce proceedings, which is why he reached out now and why the rest of the family was upset with how I responded at the time, he wasn’t in a good place already. I’ve told them that if they care about him to encourage him to keep away from me, refuse to pass on any messages, and try to get him into inpatient care or something if they’re that worried he’s going to do something rash. I don’t want anything to do with him and I’ve told them that I don’t want to hear about anything that happens after this point, but the rest of his family loves him so for their sake I hope he pulls himself together.


UPDATE: I had a talk with my paternal grandparents over Christmas vacation and showed them the PowerPoint. They had no idea that things were as bad as they were or that I was actively self destructive at the time and the “accidents” I had as a teen were not really accidents. So, while they think it was still dangerously harsh under the circumstances, they understand better where I’m coming from, admit that my father messed up big time, and that the family should have been more involved with me instead of just supporting him and my brother. They said that on the surface they thought I was fine and just having trouble adjusting, but if they had known about the things described in the journal they would have insisted my father get help. They do want me to reconcile with him, but they understand why it might be too late for that so they’ve agreed not to bring him up unless I do first and not pass on information either way. So, that was actually productive.


As for my father, I know a lot of people think I’ll regret it if I don’t reconcile, forgive, or whatever, but I’m not so sure that’s true. I’ve tried to imagine a conversation with him that wouldn’t make things worse, and I can’t. Best case scenario, he’s sorry and has a good grovel, but honestly I think hearing that would just make me hate him more. Worst case scenario, nothing has really changed and I have to walk away before I end up with an assault charge. I also just can’t imagine any real benefit or function to having him in my life, so reconnecting seems like a lot of work for no gain. As far as forgiveness, I don’t know if that’s actually possible. Apathy, maybe.


As far as I know, he’s alive. I’ve made it super clear that anyone who tries to give me information about him that I don’t request will also get the chop, so I’m probably not going to get any further updates. I’d rather just go back to forgetting he exists.


For me, I’m probably as fine as I’m going to be. I have therapy and meds. I can pass for a functional human most of the time. My deal with myself is that I have to at least stick around until my maternal grandparents pass so they don’t hurt and I can wrap things up for them, so in the mean time I’m working on finding other raison d’etra. Spite, possibly.

[foshershmul]

Well, seems like the deserve each other and the mom was the outlier.

[pandafuzzy]

Forward that Power Point to me, I need it.

[mariefreeman]

I understand how you feel you.
I hope you can see your father at least once. Once your father is no longer alive, it will be too late.

[nataliebremmer]

This is the only good Reddit story account fr