So was my father 'just a sperm donor' so therefore I was not entitled to want to meet him?

[BubbleGirl01]

My father left my mother when I was around 5. I did not see him again from the age of around 7/8 until I was 38.

Contact with him was cut after we moved 200 miles away due to my stepfather's job (and I do believe my mother intentionally moved to cut contact especially as she did not tell my father we were moving!)

I do have some memories of him of him doing fatherly things and of visiting after the divorce and I have always had the sense that I was very close to him and was completely devastated by him 'abandoning' me which of course I could not/was not allowed to articulate as a child especially as my mother hated his guts and would not countenance so much as his name being mentioned. He told me he changed my nappies, fed me, taught me to ride a bike etc.

My mother was disgusted that I wanted to meet him a few years back (due to having DCs of my own and always wondering about him and whether he was alive) and declared that he had had no impact on my life at all neither did their very nasty divorce apparently and said he was no more than a 'sperm donor' and referred to him as my 'biological father only'. This was something that contributed massively to her cutting contact with me completely amongst other stuff.

I have not been able to forge a relationship with my father as an adult as it really is too late now. I didn't have any trust in him as he was demonised by mother and I guess I was a bit scared of getting involved/my DC getting involved as my mother accused him of violence during their marriage although he disputes that and my mother certainly was not scared of him as I remember her screaming obscenities at him.

He moved on, has been married to his 2nd wife for over 25 years and brought up her children and I can't get past my bitterness about that as he did not financially support us despite having quite a lot of money and that's something he wanted to conveniently forget when I met him a few years ago.

I still have a lot of guilt in my 'betrayal' of my mother though and sometimes late at night irrationally think that I was in the wrong to want to meet him and open the can of worms that I did, especially as my siblings agree with my mother, that I did a 'disgusting' thing .

I do think he was more than a 'sperm donor' though and portraying him as that massively minimises the feelings that I had for him and the impact the 'loss' of him had on me. AIBU?

You poor thing, sounds very painful. Your mother does sound highly manipulative to her own gain.

I think you shouldn't feel guilty about what you want to do next. Very hard I know as it will have been a constant in your life.

Have you had any counselling? That sounds rather a lot to deal with :(
I had some for similar issues and it helped me accept it wasn't my fault (I felt it was) and it lifted the guilt I felt. I also accepted I would never have answers for the actions of other people's behaviour.

It really helped. I hope you are okay x

I received my counselling through a private practise that did concessions with final year psychotherapy students, so I just paid for the room rent. The room was always bloody freezing though! But it's worth looking into

Thanks for all the replies.

Yes the guilt is from a thick, dark suffocating FOG. It took a massive amount of courage to stand up to my mother about this and the rest of my abusive childhood. I had this childish terror that she and my stepfather would 'come to get me' for months afterwards so much so that I couldn't sleep. Yet my mother has painted me as mentally ill to the rest of my family and that bloody stings so much so that I go over and over my behaviour of the last few years to 'check' if it is me rather than them.

We did move frequently after the 1st move away from my father. Three times in the preceeding three years. We had been at the 3rd house for about 3 years when he tried to contact us when I was 15. He was also in the Navy so moved around a lot himself.

It doesn't matter now though. There is no going back with him, I have told him what I thought of him - he too told me I needed counselling! I have had 3 years of it but had to work on coming to terms with the death of one of my children as well as my abusive mother, being sexually abused as a child and raped as an adult and I probably still need a lot or work!

The main reason that I couldn't move forward with him is the fact that he left me with my mother and never 'rescued' me. I can't forgive him for that.

lot OF work

It all sounds like a really horrible mess, OP. I second those who say you should look into counselling. It might help you get to grips with how you feel about everything that's happened to you, rather than what everyone else tells you you should feel.

I've been in the same situation as your mum and also find it difficult to talk about my ex to 'his' kids, and if I'm brutally honest think of him as no more than a sperm donor. He has a lot of money - I mean hundreds of thousands in the bank, but has paid zero maintenance because he was on Incapacity Benefit which got him out of having to bother.

There may be more to this than meets the eye. My ex was highly manipulative and emotionally abusive when I was with him and after I left him, bombarded me with emails which resulted in two harassment court cases (one he got off on a technicality, the next he got convicted). As a mother, naturally I wanted to protect my kids growing up from knowing what a dick this man was so I didn't like talking about him, either. He was extremely abusive, including something towards the end of our 'relationship' that was something I still haven't come to terms with over a decade on.

My kids will never be told all of this.

As they got older, they put two and two together and they do know he pays no maintenance whilst he holidays abroad, goes on outings with the hypocrites at his Alpha course, etc etc.

But they don't know the half of it.

There may be stuff your mum doesn't want to tell you. Unspeakable stuff. Cut her some slack.

ETA: The stuff about him teaching you to ride your bike etc may not even be true.

I know for a fact if my kids ever met this idiot, in adulthood (and currently they don't want to but that may change), he would lie like a bastard to them. He'd convince them he paid for their entire upbringing (he gave me £20 towards a nursery fee once, and bought one pushchair). He'd convince them he was father of the year before he disappeared. I'd only trust your concrete memories.

I think again, that there are people on here with their own stories and experiences which sound like they are very very different from the OP. It sounds, from Bubblegirl's last post like there are very clear issues of abuse on Mothers part and that Bubblegirl has been working hard to try and come to terms with that. I think that suggesting that she ought to cut her mum some slack is not helpful at all given this context.

Three years is not that long Bubblegirl, considering what you have been through - sounds like you are doing a great job of beginning to take control of all of this though which is brilliant - as you take more and more control things will start to make more sense in your own mind and then this fog will start to lift so that you can start to trust your own memories and instincts rather than relying on other peoples.

Oh, BubbleGirl. You have so much to work through. DH had a similar upbringing.

His mum was very odd, told tales about his dad, married him to get away from her own abusive dad, had 3 kids in just under 3 years, and then told such lies about her DH that he had to leave. Her story at the time was he was physically and emotionally abusive. Her brothers persuaded him to leave. She was incandescent with rage when he remarried very shortly after their divorce.

She told DH that his dad was a workshy brute of a man who never sent money and didn't want him. DH wanted to go with his dad, but his mum said he couldn't. So DH and his sibs travelled to their dad's every weekend until they were 16. They had no choice, their mum enforced it... she often drove DH halfway and told him the rest of the trip on foot was his dad's fault (country lanes, 10 miles).

His dad used to just take them in when they arrived, mix them into his family and then drive them back home. He never, ever bad mouthed her.

Many years later she told me that she had indeed made it all up. She had hated her life and lashed out at him. Blaming him and making the kids hate him made her feel better, more in control. She also admitted that she was the violent one, the one who spent the money, had affairs and flaunted it all to make their dad angry. He had never done anything other than work very long hours to provide her with as much money as possible. He only ever hit her once... to make her drop a knife she was holding to her own wrist.

To this day he will not hear a word said against her. He repeats, she had a hard life, she wasn't to blame. This despite the fact that DHs sibs have had nothing to do with him since they turned 16 (mid 50s now) and still believe that he was/is a monster.

I am not saying that this is the same as your situation, but DH had a lot to work through to be able to continue a relationship with both parents. He had a lot of 'unbelieving' to do. Something his sibs have never managed to do.

I hope you find your way through this and manage to see that your feelings are very much shaped by your mum and her anger. You don't have to feel guilty or as though you are betraying her. I can see you know this, good luck working your way through the quagmire.

Now that you have children bubly if your dh left and got custody and then moved away...how would you deal with that?

Would you find a new partner and play happy families with the new kids or would you move heaven and earth to find them and then try and force custody? I know what I would do.

Your mother sounds like a not very nice person but I would not assume that also means your dad wasn't.

was I mean!

In other words your dad may have also been abusive!