When a parent sees someone mistreating their child, it’s dangerous to underestimate the lengths they’re willing to go to protect them.
Because when a person loves someone to that extent, it doesn’t matter who is responsible for that cruelty. If they feel like a relative , their romantic partner, or even their own parents are causing harm to the ones they love the most, those sudden adversaries can often be surprised to see that they aren’t the number one priority in that person’s life.
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And no matter how much the guilty party often tries to deny it, the secrecy with how they often carry out their malicious acts betrays exactly how aware they are that what they’re doing is wrong.
But if one dad didn’t happen to be in just the right place to hear one very revealing conversation, there’s no telling how long his son would have to put up with what sounds like a pattern of awful treatment.
After spending some time as a widower, the man we’re about to hear from married a woman with a 16-year-old daughter. So both of them now live with him and his 13-year-old son.
As he explained in a Reddit post , his son tends to keep to himself and since his wife and stepdaughter are more outgoing, they’ve often tried to get him to share in their activities and join gatherings with extended family.
Apparently, they did this to an extent that the son felt that his need for space was invalidated, but apologized once the man told them to stop.
While he figured that was the end of it, he learned that their issues ran deeper than expected when he overheard a conversation they had about a Mother’s Day celebration he was planning for his wife.
Apparently, she had been trying to convince the son to tell the man to exclude him from the party because she thought his introverted attitude would ruin the mood.
He assured her that we would socialize and behave as she wanted, but she didn’t believe him. And when he kept trying to plead his case, she snapped at him, saying that she wasn’t his mom anyway so she didn’t know why he wanted to join them.
As the man relayed, “My stepdaughter threw some (I don’t remember) backhanded comment and then both of them were shocked to see me standing there. Both were staring without saying anything.”
In response, he told her he was cancelling the celebration because of what she and her daughter said to his son, which led her to start doing damage control.
As the man put it, “She tried to explain that she didn’t mean it like that and that I only heard part of the conversation but not all of it.”
But since he stood firm, she’s now accusing him of ruining Mother’s Day for her and he’s wondering if he made the right decision.
And the resounding response from the Reddit community he reached out to was that his reaction was entirely appropriate.
Furthermore, many wondered how many times the wife and stepdaughter had spoken to his son like this when he wasn’t around.
As one user said , “Guarantee they have done this before. Circle the wagons, protect your son. Such disgusting abuse from your wife upon your son. To make it even worse, she is raising her daughter to be cruel and exclusionary. Your son deserves so much better.”
And since the man is starting to suspect that too, the community is adamantly suggesting that a divorce might me necessary to protect the son.
h/t: Reddit | FredWalker37