I do visit my father, but I feel like I don't want to. I feel incredibly guilty about this as he says he misses me and my siblings, but there are a lot of things that happened in my childhood which I now understand which make me feel this way.
When I was younger I was a daddy's girl, no matter what he did wrong or how much he failed at being a father I still idolised him and would defend him whenever my mother's side of the family or teachers at school tried to fault him. When I was 7 years old he had an affair with a 17 year old, leaving home and his four children. The youngest was just a baby, and from then on he refused to acknowledge my little brother as being his child despite the fact that he was the spitting image (and still is) of his first child. My brother has never seen him.
My other two brothers and I would visit him every weekend. Now that I am older, I am not sure why this was the case as he would go out drinking every night we were there and spend the next day in bed. My stepmother (the young girl that he had an affair with) was responsible for looking after us during this time, so we barely saw our father. When we did see him he had no idea how to look after us and would give us alcohol as a treat. I was drinking in his home from as young as 8; wine, vodka, whiskey, sambuka, beer etc. He didn't see a problem with this.
As I am older now my mother talks to me about some things that happened back then. My father paid no maintenance and one week my mother was struggling to buy our school uniforms and we had no trainers. She wrote a letter for my father asking if he could get us some shoes and when I gave this to him he ripped it up and laughed. He never gave my mother any money as he saw it as him giving her money, rather than his children. He used to threaten to report her whenever I went around and told me he would get my mother fined/sent to prison. He didn't seem to care about the position this would put us in, just his own pettiness. He was physically and mentally abusive to her in their relationship and I have vivid memories of calling the police on him when I saw him strangling her.
He would make me and my siblings fight each other and then join in when one of us hurt the other as "punishment". He'd force us to play games with him and then get angry when he lost and send us to bed. He'd wake me and my older brother up at 4am and take us outside when he was drunk and falling over, leaving us to try and drag him home. When I got older and decided I didn't want to drink he would take it as a personal affront and get angry at me. He would get me to say outloud that I'd shoot my own mother for his own personal satisfaction.
Despite all this and the fact he rarely spent time with me I still liked him as a child. I'm 24 now, and I can see clearly how absolutely insane most of this is and how I wouldn't dream of doing any of it with DSD. Yet I still feel guilty for not wanting to see him. He doesn't seem to realise how bad he has been, or the impact it has had on me. I don't know how to talk about it, but I find it hard to respect and want to spend time with a man that abused my mother and is an alcoholic digging himself an early grave. His mother died of diabetes and his father or liver disease (alcohol induced). His lifestyle has given him diabetes and he is an alcoholic, so I fear he will go the same way and for years now I have been trying to mentally prepare myself for that.
AIBU for not wanting to spend a lot of time with him?
AIBU?
To not want to visit my father?
Renotry · 10/07/2015 14:20
You would not be unreasonable to never see him again. He sounds absolutely vile and what you describe is clearly abuse.
You don't owe him anything because he happened to father you. your poor mother 
having to cope with all that. It must have hurt her so much.
I am sure that you didn't enjoy his treatment of you, you didn't love his abuse of you and of your mother. I suspect that what you loved, or wanted, or was desperately trying to find/pretend, was an actual father. Not this man and how he treated you, but the loving decent father every child wants and needs.
I think that you need to get whatever help or support you need in order to come to terms with who he is and the fact that he is not and never was a father to you and that he simply doesn't deserve you.
You do not have to have him in your life. Please believe this. You can choose to or you can choose not to. you don't HAVE to.
What a horrible time you've had, OP.
I would suggest that you go to Al Anon - that's the organisation for family members of alcoholics. There you will meet other people who have had their lives badly damaged by alcoholic family members. They can help you learn how to detach from your father's alcoholic behaviour and neediness. Your first priority needs to be keeping yourself safe and sane.
You've done an amazing thing coming out of this and having so much perspective at age 24!
He insists on you visiting him, but he will only see you in the pub - that says everything about where his priorities lie. If you do decide you want to stay in contact with him (and you don't have to), it needs to be on your terms, not his. Otherwise you're just enabling his toxic and destructive behaviour.
Good luck!
To comment on this thread you need to create a Mumsnet account.