to want to see my Dad without my (awful) stepmum sometimes?

[LoveIsAVerb]

Hi all. I'm new here, go gentle!

Around this time of year, I have my annual argument with my stepmother. It was pretty low-key this year: at our annual pre-Christmas get together, she made a few snarky comments; I told her to pipe down after the final snarky comment; and she apologised. (More detail on that later!)

But it's raised a perennial issue: my stepmother and I fundamentally do not get on, and I would really like to see my Dad occasionally without her being there. But this never happens. Around this time every year, following my annual tiff with my stepmum, my sister (42, two kids) and I (40, no kids) have a word with my Dad - just "hey Dad, it would be really nice to hang out together without stepmum being there". After that, we usually have ONE walk together, he's a bit awkward about the whole thing, and then it just goes back to normal, i.e. her always being there.

It's not just that she's always there when we see him, either. Even when we call his mobile, he always puts us on speaker so that she can be involved in the conversation. We hardly ever even get to text privately; he routes all texts through the group family chat, which includes him, her, my sister and I, and my stepsisters.

Dad and stepmum have been married for 20-odd years. He left my mother for her (he was having an affair with her). I'm not particularly arsed about that tbh; mum also had affairs. I'd like to state upfront that I haven't put her into some "Evil Stepmother" trope; I'm happy that he's found someone. It's not the "stepmum" factor; it's specifically about HER, as an individual. We have wildly different values. She comes from Old Money and is, frankly, a massive snob. (My Dad came from nothing, for context, but made pretty good money by working his way up in a company, back when that was a possibility!)

This clash in values tends to be where our arguments stem from. This year, for example, at the annual Christmas get-together:

• One of the dogs spilt my sister's drink over the table. It's this super-expensive, ornate, carved wooden table with a glass top. Stepmum FREAKED THE FUCK OUT, literally shrieking, talking about how they'd need to get it professionally cleaned etc etc. It was literally a bit of prosecco. My sister was mortified and left soon after.
• My stepsister's fella (early 30s), an ordinary lower-middle-class bloke from Birmingham, mentioned that his mother isn't much of a wine drinker, she thinks Echo Falls is brilliant. To which, again, stepmother SHRIEKS with laughter. She's literally a millionnaire. Laughing at this ordinary working-class woman who doesn't know about wine. It made me feel physically sick. Bearing in mind, too, that my partner (50f) was also there, and she grew up in care, on the absolute bones of her arse; Echo Falls would've been a distant fucking DREAM.
• My sister and I gave Dad and stepmum a hamper with loads of posh food in it for Xmas. I wrapped it in cellophane and ribbons and whatnot. I made a joke about how shit I am at wrapping things (context: I'm from South Wales, self-deprecation is endemic to our humour). She shrieks: "Oh I bet you relished the opportunity to skive off work for a bit to wrap it!" I work 60-hour weeks for a human rights organisation. She is an ex-doctor, and (endemic to the profession, in my experience!) therefore thinks she is better than everyone else. (This final comment was when I told her to pipe down, and she apologised, while shrieking.)

I just feel like whenever I'm at her (perfect show-home) house, I'm playing a bit-part in a fantasy M&S advert - with her at the centre. I never feel comfortable there, because if a drink gets spilled or you get too close to some expensive item of homeware, all hell breaks loose. Don't get me wrong: she cooks, she hosts, that's very generous of her. But it's The Stepmum Show, constantly. She takes over the conversation, she's not funny (unforgivably, imo!), she's just incredibly UP herself - and, as I said, a massive snob. The above is the tip of the iceberg, honestly. She literally thinks people who weren't born into inherited wealth are basically lazy and stupid.

She's always been a bit weird with me tbh. E.g. when I was about 20, we had a blazing row about something or other, and she apologised afterwards and told me straight-up that she is intimidated by my intelligence. I mean honestly, wtf?! Even if you FELT it, would you SAY it?! But she does seem majorly insecure, like she had a very good education but was essentially educated above her intelligence because her parents were rich; she seems very uncomfortably with the fact (which I LOVE) that intelligence is pretty equally distributed among the population, and you cannot fucking BUY it, however hard you try.

I'm ranting, sorry!

Everyone who's met her agrees that she's awful, a snob, and wtf is Dad doing with her - but Dad seems, or acts, oblivious. As I said, he's from a very working-class, South Wales background. He never sees his friends anymore, really; they obviously think she's a stuck-up bitch. He is also more or a less a functioning alcoholic at this point. Getting slowly sozzled on posh wine while she runs the Stepmum Show and offends everyone, seemingly obliviously.

One more example of what she's like: a few years back, she and my Dad went on a weekend away for his best mate's 60th. She took one of his childhood friends aside and said: "Do you mind not talking about your childhood memories this weekend? I don't really like hearing about times before [Dad] and I were together."

My sister is a peacekeeper, plus Dad and stepmum do a huge amount to help with their kids (she is not entirely evil - she is very generous in helping with the kids). So she is not one to rock the boat. She also lives very close to them, and he helps her out a lot, sees her a lot, etc. I only live about 20 miles away, mind, but he never comes up here (and when he does, it's always with stepmum).

I'm wondering wtf to do, tbh. I love my Dad and I know he loves me. More than that, we LIKE each other; we get along great. But she just takes over every single interaction and it's really getting on my tits and affecting my relationship with him.

I'm not stupid: I know I'm not gonna change her and he's not gonna leave her. So I'm trying to think what to do that wouldn't just be me ranting. I was thinking of maybe writing him an email (presuming she doesn't check his emails as well as answer his phone, but who knows, honestly). Just explaining how I feel. Especially, explaining that I'm not avoiding HIM (I'm really worried that he thinks I am), that the problem isn't HIM, it's HER (though the problem is also, let's face it, him being a bit fucking useless in a Man way). And just asking if we can spend time together without her. But I don't want to make his life more difficult for him, either. But an email could help because he wouldn't immediately FORGET it (which he has a tendency to do with phone calls, probably because of the whole high-functioning alcoholic thing), and he could read back over it, and tbh I'm better at communicating via writing than in person / on the phone anyway, and he could have some time to process it?

Is this just a losing battle, do I just need to get over it?!

Thanks so much in advance for any advice / shared stories / etc! <3

God she sounds so insecure to me tbh .
The fact she apologises means she isn't a narc in my book . I don't know what you can do to manage your relationship with your Father if he isn't willing to meet up with you and your sister alone . It's up to your Dad really .
I wish you the very best of luck OP.

Agreed, I'm also curious if OP's partner has taken into account the vocational degrees that offer guaranteed bursaries, and included degree Apprenticeships? The uptake of these do also tend to make them more financially accessible for working class students.

Keep going OP, and you might get your wish. I had similar with my SM and DF. She got with my DF during my mid teens, and was an awful person. My thought process was that I didn’t pick her, my dad did, so i didn’t have to accept her in my life. It was hard at first as my DF involved her with every aspect of our interaction. Phone calls. Meet ups. Visits to my home. Bloody well always there. But I persevered with my requests for one on one time, and eventually managed to get it. She was incandescent with rage about it though, and sometimes it did feel like too much drama, but prior to his passing a few years later, me and my father had forged a strong relationship.

Hmm.

Every conversation she "shrieks".

She is an ex doctor, and endemic to the profession (In your opinion) is to think you're better than anyone else.

I'm wondering if you tend to exaggerate, or generalise about people yourself (hypocritically, imo).

You are not unreasonable to want time alone with him, but that fact that you don't get it is his fault, I'd say.

So I was correct in my original statement, then ("Yes, I am saying that most of the 40% of kids who attend university are not working class")?

"So, I'm not entirely sure how the above would translate into 'one working-class kid in each year group'" - you realise that those 28% of lower-class students are not perfectly evenly distributed across regions, universities, and courses, right? And that earlier on, I said that my partner was talking about her experience as a lecturer, i.e. on one course, in one university, in one city? So it's possible that my partner's knowledge is not the problem here, as per your (pretty damn rude) earlier accusation?

Yes, of course - I just posted about this in response to someone else before seeing your post. According to that previous poster, fewer than 1 in 3 students are working class. In some institutions, e.g. Russell Group, that figure drops to 1 in 5; and when we look at the proportion of students of those universities who received free school meals, i.e. the poorest students, the proportion drops to fewer than 4%.

Sources:

• 1 in 5: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/epdf/10.1111/ejed.12298
• Fewer than 4%: https://www.suttontrust.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/Universities-and-Social-Mobility-Summary.pdf

Thank you. Yeah I don't think she's entirely narcissistic, I think insecurity is the main thing, as you point out. Thank you very much for the kind wishes!

Thank you for sharing this, that's really reassuring, and I'm so glad you got to build a good relationship with your father before he passed away. Sounds like perseverance could be the key! How did you do that, if you don't mind asking / if that's not a stupid question? Did you just come straight out and badger him, like "Dad, can we have one on one time?", over and over again?! Or more subtle than that?

(Love your use of "incandescent" btw! Bloody good word!😍)

I wish I could record a conversation with her, then you could be the judge of whether I'm exaggerating about the "shrieking" 😅 But tbf, if someone else said this about a woman, I would probably think they were being a bit misognyist tbf - it's a deeply gendered word, right? Hints of "hysterical"?! - so I can't blame people for being a bit suspicious of my diction there!

I have experienced a lot of classism among doctors, personally, and that comment was prefaced with "in my experience", and I have since apologised for any offence caused and clarified that no, of course I do not believe that every single doctor is like that. I was fuming when I wrote the original post (and I think, like everyone, I do have a tendency to exaggerate when furious). I've sinced calmed down considerably!

Thank you for your answer to the AIBU question! Yeah, that's my feeling too, though I'm not sure how useful it is, really... Annoying that you just cannot change people, ha.

(Geeky aside, if you're interested - might just be me, admittedly!: A fair number of studies have found that medical professionals are particularly vulnerable to the representativeness heuristic, i.e. generalising and stereotyping groups of people. Loads of research on this in terms of race, gender, class, etc. Probably the most famous studies are about race, i.e. differences in assumptions - and thus treatment - of black vs white patients; but there's also plenty of research on this in terms of class and gender.

One example that springs to mind is endometriosis, both because I suffer from that and because it's had a fair bit of media coverage lately. Lots of women suffer profoundly as a result of doctors' generalisations about women exaggerating their pain.

So yeah, perhaps I do sometimes generalise about doctors... but my generalisations are nowhere as near as consequential or harmful as doctors' generalisations about their patients.)

(ETA: not all doctors, etc. etc. etc.!)

Am I reading this thread correctly? You’re a fully grown adult in your 40s with your own life, and you’re resentful your dad rather spends his time with his life partner over you?

Emphasis on this bring your dads choice.

Yet you hate HER?

I’ve seen her type before. The Other Woman who gets the man but never feels secure and therefore wants to own every interaction. She will therefore of course feel particularly insecure around his children but the comment about the childhood friend not being allowed to talk about childhood memories is absolutely classic of this type. He probably partly drinks because he knows he lets himself live under her social control. However. He has chosen that life.

The thing is nearly all of this is about her when he is 95% of the problem. You are making her out to be the wicked stepmother but actually he has let her become one. He is the one routing all texts through the family WhatsApp. He is the one who won’t stand up to her and say that he wants 1-1 time sometimes with his daughters. She probably makes him feel very indispensable and admired because she needs him so much.

You have a choice to take it up with him and actually say how it makes you feel. Not that ahe’s annoying. That it makes you feel overlooked, displaced and rejected. If you can’t be honest with him that’s understandable but then your choice is only to deal with it.

She’s annoying and insecure. But he’s crap.

Being a snob is not endemic to the medical profession, so YABU. Learn to write shorter posts, too.