Dear Alex:

Your father’s wife yelled at your three year old or so or in his presence (“”my father’s wife was yelling that my son… All this time my son was right there, listening to her”). Your father’s response, he “never interfered and then left the room”. Your husband said nothing.

You wrote: “For 20 years I stepped on my own throat trying not to get into arguments with her for the sake of keeping an ok relationship with my father”.

Let’s look at your “ok relationship” with your father, from your May 2016 thread: “it still hurts when he calls me ‘stupid’ over some trivial mistake I made…it’s almost impossible to share anything with him without him being harsh and judgmental…It all boils down to ‘I’m older and smarter, shut your mouth and listen to me’… him starting screaming and raising his voice…”.

My thought: I don’t think it is worth it, to tolerate his wife’s abuse of you and your young children for the sake of keeping this relationship with your father. Even if you did have a healthy relationship with your father, nothing would make it worthwhile to endure abuse, especially one inflicted on young children (whether the screaming is at them directly, or in their presence, doesn’t matter it is abuse nonetheless).

You wrote in this thread, regarding your father and his wife: “I noticed they actually never would call me (I took the initiative for the past dozen  years), not even for my birthday, or my kids’ birthday”. This is consistent with what you shared May 2016 regarding  your father and your mother: “in case with my mother I can’t even call her- she keeps changing phone numbers and would never contact me on her own, in case with my father- I would be the one reaching out to him”.

My thoughts: better you don’t have contact with your father or his wife because the two of them are abusive to you and directly or indirectly, they are abusive to your young children.

Notice though the reasons you indicated in May 2016 for keeping contact with them: “I feel guilty for ‘abandoning’ my parents if cutting down on communication with them… for the sake of them not feeling abandoned by me… I do feel guilty about already not communicating enough with my parents”.

My thoughts: it is you chasing them for contact, you reaching out to them, not the other way around. If they are not reaching out to you, not initiating contact with you, that means they don’t need you. If they don’t need you, it is not possible for you to abandon them.

I think you are confused (as I have been for decades on the same issue): your mother and father don’t need you. It is you who still need them.

If you understood it, you would not feel guilty about cutting all contact with them. What is the loss for them? If there was a loss for them, they would be calling you (not changing numbers not notifying you, in the case of your mother, and in the case of your father, he would be calling you on your birthdays and your kids’ birthdays, at the least).

“I do feel guilty about not communicating enough with my parents”- but they are the one responsible for that. They are the ones who are not motivated to have contact with you. They don’t care to.

And then you are confused about another thing (as I have been too), you think your father is a child that needs you, his mother, to teach and train him: “”I do set boundaries and can tell him I’m finishing our conversation and will talk to him once he’s able to talk constructively”- as if he was a misbehaving child and you were his mother.

I agree with you: “I sometimes feel it might be a waste of my time and energy to try to ‘train’ (your father) to talk to me as a person on the same level as him”- your father is done being taught an trained and has been done being trained way before you came into his life as a baby.

He doesn’t want to be trained by you or by anyone. He doesn’t value you as someone smart or wise enough to train him or anyone. After all, he repeatedly calls you or refer to you as stupid.

If you want, we can communicate more about the current issue of your husband and his interactions with you regarding your father and father’s wife as well as his interactions with them directly. But for now, what I wrote here is enough for you to consider, if you will. Let me know.

anita