To ask DD to make it up with her dad

You are getting good advice and I can well understand this is very painful for you.
Unfortunately, the reality is your daughter may no longer feel as safe around your husband.
If this truly is a complete aberration on your husbnds part, I think he should write her a letter of genuine apology with the hope that trust can be rebuilt.
Having any person put their hands on you IS a big deal.
There should be zero confusion on the message you send to her....ANYONE putting their hands on her is wrong.
Wishing you well.

@CreativeDaisy

She told me DH had got in her face shouting about how her work wasn't life-or-death and then he grabbed her and pushed her out of his way.

Does your husband have any idea of what your daughter does first a living? Why is he trying to invalidate what she does for a profession - and which pays her bills ?

Does he not realise how intimidating it is to have a full grown man in a woman's face, shouting the odds? Or laying his hands on her in anger? Did she go through something similar with the husband she divorced? And now her own father does this?

I also agree you should not be treading the path, however well meant, of trying to get another woman to make herself smaller to make a man feel better. 🌹

This.

Your husband sounds a horrendous bully.

Sorry but it 100% sounds like it's DH that needs to do the apologising

@LakieLady op just sounds like the type of woman to make excuses for men, bet similar things have happened in the past that she has blamed her daughter for or downplayed her husband’s actions

Even after making allowances for the fact that your DH may not have appreciated that a Zoom meeting is no different from a physical meeting, I still think his behaviour was inexcusable.

He needs to be the one apologising and trying to make it up with her, not the other way round, and you should be asking him to do that. And he needs to apologise for interrupting her while she was working at all, and especially so when she was in a meeting, as well as for getting physical with her. And he should admit that laying a hand on her is completely unacceptable and that he deeply regrets it.

I'm gobsmacked that you can't see this tbh, OP.

To be honest I think there’s more to it than this. Your husband doesn’t respect your daughter.

He thinks her job is poxy, not worth informing her in advance about power outages, not worth waiting until she’s free before getting in her face and interrupting her in meetings. He then couldn’t let it go and started shouting at her, getting in her face, and physically attacking her whilst she is working because he thinks he’s better than her and her job is worthless and he couldn’t accept being asked to stop. It just screams misogyny tbh. I’m not even a feminist or someone that is invested in gender by any means but your husband just comes across and huffy and trying to assert dominance over her?

I work from home too - if I’m in a meeting I don’t want my household interrupting me. That’s completely normal. She wasn’t rude. It’s that neither you or your husband consider her job meaningful.

His shitty apology doesn’t make up for it. You’re a silly person for thinking he’s making amends because he is sorry to you, when you are not the one he has wronged? He can’t apologise to her by apologising to you, that doesn’t make sense. You need to be having a frank conversation with him that his actions were disgusting and that you are on your daughter’s side. Else both of you will lose her, not just him.

A very similar thing happened to me in my mid-late 20s.

I was visiting with my parents, who lived quite a way away, so it always involved an overnight stay. And for some reason, dad and I got into a squabble over something we were looking at on the computer. He said, "I'm going to give you such a slap in a minute."
To which I immediately replied, "If you ever dare do that, I'll pack my bags right now, and you'll never see me again."
TBH, he was really shocked and immediately tried to back-track. I think it shocked us BOTH how quickly it escalated.

I left the room right after and went and had a cry - more out of shock than anything.

Frankly, I think your DD is behaving exactly as expected. She came to your house to help you watch your nephew - doing you a favour. And in response, her job is disrupted and minimised, and then she's threatened and physically assaulted by her father.
I think she was right to accept his apology, but she's also allowed to have some time to assert her boundaries and coolly and calmly give the message that what happened was absolutely not okay.

What should have happened....Meter man, you have to wait until a very important work call is finished, thank you.

Daughter finishes work call...Dad tells daughter about meter change....all fine.

Instead Dad barges in and attempts to talk to daughter who's possibly on a VERY important call.

All this over you or husband panicking over a simple thing.

Why didn't someone just text her or pass her a note

I admire your daughter for putting strong boundaries in place to protect herself. Her relationship with both of you has changed forever and it’s sad that you can’t see why.

As someone who was raised in a “sweep it under the carpet” household, I can attest that when you are raised like this, and have the mix of parents one of whom is aggressive and one is a fence sitter, it’s very very difficult to stand up to them, and follow through with asserting your boundaries. maybe she’s had enough and there’s nothing you can do because your DH doesn’t deserve his daughter despite “being there through her divorce”

Why are you wanting your daughter to just sweep it all under the carpet and just accept someone shouting in her face and putting their hands on her forget about that someone being her own dad for a minute would you be encouraging her to forgive and forget if it had been her ex husband that did that to her. Instead of condoning what your husband did maybe try giving your daughter some space for the time being and stop trying to make all this your daughters fault your DH was in the wrong.

I just don't know what to do to make it better.

Well for a start, stop trying to make it her fault. It’s disgraceful that you think your daughter owes your husband an apology. You’re trying to make her share blame in a desperate attempt to force a reconciliation. There’s nothing worse than an apology that comes with a “but…” at the end of it.

Your daughter hasn’t even stopped talking to either of you. Okay, so she’s been a bit distant lately - maybe that’s because she needs some time to deal with this? The best thing you can do here is give her that time rather than trying to force things.

Don't erode your daughter's boundaries because it makes you uncomfortable FFS

Keep out of it and let them resolve it themselves.

Well if the power/wifi cut what that imminent, what could OP’s daughter do about it anyway? Would she even have had time to explain? If the worst came to the worst, she’d just have to text someone else on the call or send an email from her phone, just as you would if your own connection died for some reason.

In the time he’d spent gesticulating and getting stroppy that his daughter wouldn’t just drop everything to listen to HIM, he could have typed “WiFi going off, sorry” on his phone and shown it to her if he didn’t have time to fetch a pen.

It doesn't imply that at all, actually. The most you can know for certain is that she happened to be standing between him and the door and didn't immediately step out the way when he wanted to leave. You can’t even be sure he asked her politely to move before manhandling her.

Also, OP already says her husband had been shouting in his daughter's face. So even if she was blocking his exit and shouting at him, she was responding in kind to how he chose to discuss the matter. You are not the aggressor if you shout back at someone who has shouted at you first, and blocking the door to make sure they let you reply rather than merely screaming at you and leaving does not merit them physically shoving you around.

Because when she didn’t do what he wanted, he pushed and shoved at her. Which bit are you struggling with?

Setting boundaries and refusing to fall into line just because daddy says so - sounds perfectly grown up to me.

How do you or your DH know that the meeting she was in wasn't actually, at least for your adult daughter, dealing with a matter of life or death (or the equivalent in whatever field your daughter works in)?

Getting a smart meter installed can take up to an hour and if she wasn't prepared for the signal to drop, she wouldn't have been able to make alternative arrangements such as charging her laptop fully and getting her laptop to connect to the internet through her mobile phone hot spot. Also, having important appointments on a visible calendar in the kitchen would help a lot. Even if you hadn't mentioned anything you could have it on a calendar and she could have asked, but as you didn't, she couldn't.

As for your DH trying to get her attention while she was on a call, well, unless he was slipping her a piece of paper saying that "The electricity meter is being swapped out shortly - sorry forgot to tell you ahead of time", nothing, and I really mean nothing is more difficult than trying to hold two separate conversations at the same time when both people that you are trying to listen to are essentially talking over each other. Your DH hasn't covered himself in glory here by doing that, and then escalating the issue and shouting at his daughter and then (I don't use this term lightly) assaulting her by pushing her forcefully out of his way. I think he needs to accept that he was wrong, probably having a bad day but he was wrong and he is sorry (i.e. he won't do it again) for what he did.

I do not condone violence. However

He grabbed her and pushed her out of the way.

That suggests she was blocking him while shouting at him when he was trying to remove himself from the situation.

If that’s what she was doing, was he supposed to quietly hang his head and await permission to leave?

If she’d been at her work place and a senior member of staff, any colleague, had tried to get her attention to interrupt a call, she would have asked the person she was speaking to to hold on a minute or let her call them back.

She certainly wouldn’t shout and block them in. So if her dad didn’t show sufficient respect for her being at work, neither did she.

Yes, her father could have left a note on the desk, but unless she was saving a life during her phone call, she overreacted and was an arsehole.

I remember my dad lost the head with me over a year ago. It was very, very hurtful and uncalled for. I did forgive him but it was hard.
Looking back, I realised he was very hungover on the day he did it. He also takes a lot of medication, and has flipped at my brother when overly medicated.
Was your husbands tolerance levels down because of anything?

If this was a team meeting I’d be fine to say what was happening. However I have many meetings with external people who it would be VERY unprofessional to do this.

Im guessing OP’s H thought she just had a nice little job where people wouldn’t mind if the unimportant lady stops her meeting.