To feel so sorry for my Dad?

[Kneehigim]

First up, he's happy, in a relationship the past 25 years and healthy.

However.

When he was a teen he moved to London to work on building sites and was there for 6 months. He then got a call to say that his father was ill and that he needed to go home to run the family business. At the same time his uncle offered to bring him to Australia with a job opportunity there.

In the heel of the hunt he went home and still runs the family business. He's a 'make the most of it' kind of person so appears happy, but whenever we chat, there's a deep longing in him for what might have been. He never fails to mention the opportunities he almost had. I think we just chat a lot so he probably doesn't actually consciously think this on a daily basis, maybe I bring out the worst in him lol. We probably have deeper conversations than most people.

So, I'm at that age in life where I can make it or break it. I've a few decisions to make. I genuinely don't want to end up 70 and a little bit sad about what I never did.

There is literally nothing I can do for my Dad apart from to succeed myself in life which cheers him up no end. I can hear the pride in his voice (and I have done nothing to be proud of).

I don't even know why I'm posting. There's nothing I can do. AIBU to be fucking annoyed with his father for stealing his future from him? What the fuck do we do to our children. Such a responsibility we hold in our hands!

Wah! I'm just ranting.

taken out of school at 12 to work would have limited their choices though.

Absolutely it did. But their parents tried to do the same for their younger siblings in both cases, and in both cases they refused point blank and stayed at school.

And my parents in turn tried to make me leave school at 15 to become a hairdresser, and I wouldn't. I wasn't at the kind of school where there was any tradition of leavers going on to university, so I had to do almost all the UCAS-equivalent applications (not in the UK), grant and scholarship applications etc myself, and when I got very good exam marks in the equivalent of A-levels, they were embarrassed in case the neighbours thought they were 'showing off' or 'getting above themselves'. They never supported me going to university and have made it plain all my life that they would have preferred me to live the kind of life they understood and could relate to.

Which is a long way round of saying that I do understand that their choices were limited by circumstance, poverty and expectations from others of course I do but I was fighting those a generation later as well, and I do find it more difficult to forgive not just their lack of encouragement, but their active discouragement of my ambition.