Stepdaughter and Daughter's Wedding

[WickedMotherofthebride]

Decided to become a member as it seems to be Stepchildren and wedding season on Mumsnet and sobbing uncontrollably to my sister isn't giving me the unbiased opinions I am after.
For the first time in our 22 year marriage my husband's ex invited him to dinner. We were very curious thinking she must be ill or something. I admit after a couple of hours I used my iphone to track him and he was at Charing Cross, then an hour later in the pub around the corner from us, he rarely drinks but came home the worse for wear and completely ashen.
Essentially if he goes ahead to walk my daughter down the aisle he can say goodbye to a relationship with his own daughter who is apparently devastated by this. Something that has been confirmed by his son.
I am one of those women who let a loser impregnate her, I thought the odd splif wasn't a big deal but he turned into an absolute stonehead who was in and out of my daughter's life until she was 8 when I married my husband. I don't know if her father's absence and my getting married was a coincidence but I think it was.
My husband is to all intents and purposes her dad.
At 15 a strange man arrived at the door wanting me to talk to him without my daughter present., obviously I wouldn't but my husband went out. It was the husband of my daughter's aunt to tell us that her dad had died.
She was given the chance to have a relationship with her family but chose not to saying that my husband was her dad.
Stepdaughter has a long term partner but there are no wedding bells.
My husband is adamant now that he can't give my daughter away something that I will not forgive him for. In fact I will divorce him if he doesn't.
The wedding is in 18 weeks.

Do grown women really need someone to 'give them away'? Could she not walk down the aisle herself?

Or could have lived apart from the OP, given his kids somewhere to stay with just him where they could relax, let OP raise her child, and moved in when the children finished school.

The idea of putting your children’s needs first shouldn’t be so alien.

We normalised broken families and adult entitlements ahead of childrens.

What is appropriate then if the children who are teens/tweens say they want to live with their mum and don’t want to stay overnight regularly? Do you coerce them to stay anyway and enforce some sort of 50/50 regime against their will?

So many people on here say how 50/50 is awful and disruptive for kids and they need a base and a home. And then in the same breath they say that a dad who has EOW is a deadbeat and they’d not consider a relationship with someone who took such a part time approach to their kids.

It wasn’t even 80:20, is the point not that the kids didn’t appear to be comfortable enough to want to stay there.

Well we assume she still lived with them and raised them - so no. But if she shipped them off to stay in another household and just went out for dinner with them a few times a week then yes I'd she was a shit mum.

I’m sure they’d have found issue with that too to be honest. Maybe because their mum moved on to such an extent and had more kids they felt their dad shouldn’t be allowed to do the same (understandable but you’d expect more understanding as adults).

This. Having dinner with your children a few times a week is not ‘maintaining a close relationship’ with them.

I feel really sorry for this man’s children. OP sounds extremely selfish to not see it from their point of view. Her husband sounds like just another crap father, but because fathers seemingly only have to take their kids to the park for half an hour, followed by feeding them a McDonald’s to be seen as a good dad by many, some people will think all of this sounds ok and that his children are the bad ones. Depressing.

Neither would I but OP did.

But what about forcing them to live with an unrelated man and then having a new second family? Isn’t that the narrative on here? Putting her sex life above her children? Shouldn’t she ideally have stayed single until her kids were 18? After all she could have dated her new partner and not lived together. And surely she didn’t need to add more children to the mix 🤷‍♀️

Your stepdaughter is being ridiculous. I have a friend whose dad is dead and there is no step dad. At her wedding a male friend walked her down the aisle. (He has a daughter.) No one ever thought it was weird. Because it isnt. I know of many other circumstances where friends or relatives have stepped in to walk a bride down the aisle. Clearly SD needs help with her jealousy around this issue

All sorts of relatives walk people up the aisle.

My dad could have walked half the country up the aisle I wouldn't have cared.

But I would have cared if he’d moved in and started parenting another girl.

Why are you just making up a new narrative. It's completely irrelevant if the mum was a good mum or not. Is a dad allowed to be shit if a mum is - is that your point??

So many excuses on this thread for bad behaviour! My ex married a widow, and dotes on his stepfamily to a ludicrous extent, having been a Disney Dad to his own children at best. But they don't tantrum like toddlers about it: they just roll their eyes and take the piss.(I think they realise that he grew up a lot after leaving us, and it's not all about them)

When it comes to their own father it should be about them.

They have chosen to laugh off their experience, it doesn’t mean that other children have to.

If they were plotting to sabotage their stepsister's wedding I'd be having a stern word, not joining in.

These are 33 and 35 year olds. They aren’t children or even young adults. Their experience isn’t horrific or unusual- their dad did remarry but he kept contact with them on the terms they wanted at the time. Their anger seems directed at the stepsister not the dad anyway. So they will keep contact but only if he refuses to walk the stepsister down the aisle. Knowing that this will upset the stepsister more than the dad.
Their behaviour is awful but then again there are many awfully behaved people about so they’re just two more of them.

I’m just saying that this dad is being vilified for having a new relationship and getting married. Something that their mother did too, before he did yet he is the terrible one. Remarriage doesn’t make someone a bad parent. Being the non resident parent doesn’t make someone a bad parent either.

They aren’t “plotting to sabotage” her wedding. Her wedding is still going ahead.

His daughter has emotions about her father walking the DD down the aisle. in her mother’s words she’s “devastated”.

And DD isn’t a cousin or a family friend. She’s a girl of a similar age group who DH moved in with and raised leaving his kids to manage being part of two step families.

Anyway, OP and DD will just have to be the better people and rise above, but I wonder what the next unreasonable demand will be.

His kids are absolutely nuts *but I am guessing they have some narrative about how youd DD was favoured and they were sidelined blah blah.

But I wouldn't die on this hill. They go low, you go high.
Your DD can walk herself down the aisle or you do it.
Your husband can do a dance with her or celebrate in somemspecial way. Do NOT discuss any of it with anyone in advance.

*i cannot overstate this enough

Their experience is unusual simply because society has evolved to normalise second families. It doesn’t mean it’s easy or that we should downplay the hurt it causes.

And people don’t snap out of childhood hurt because they are X age.

“Terms they wanted at the time”, they could only chose the terms the DH and his ex made available to them. They didn’t get to draft the contract.

OP are these step siblings going to be at the wedding?
I am also agog at the ex wife deciding to meddle in this and I wonder what sort of narrative she spun to the kids when they were younger which might well have been why they didn’t want to stay at his house.
But honestly if you’d been divorced 20 plus years would you go out for dinner with your ex specifically to tell him that he’d better not walk his stepdaughter down the aisle because it would upset your grown ass 33 year old daughter? Most normal people wouldn’t dream of it.

Their “narrative” or their lived experience that DD was prioritised?

I don’t agree his kids are nuts, I think they sound like they aren’t secure in their father’s love for them.

OP, have you actually asked your DH why he won't speak to his daughter about this?

It really does sound like a VERY strange attitude to take. I can understand your immediate reaction of jumping to divorce in such a circumstance, but you've obviously got your head around that part of the situation now, and are happy to walk your daughter down the aisle yourself. However, I would be much more angry with him for refusing to discuss the matter with his daughter, as it would seem that no one actually knows, if this ultimatum really came from her. It could be that the step son is the one who really has the problem, and is stirring up trouble, so came up with this ridiculous idea, and made up a story about his sister saying all this, which he then told his mother, possibly saying 'don't talk to DS about it, as she's really upset'. Personally, I would want to hear these feelings direct from the horse's mouth, before immediately saying that he won't walk the step daughter who he professes to love, down the aisle. I also think that in your shoes, I would tell him that if he won't talk to her about it, then you will, but that's just me.

Agreed they probably aren't secure in his love and maybe he was a shitty dad and maybe he wasn't...

But walking a woman down the aisle or not isnt going to change how much daddy loves them. And it is nuts to make demands like that and think it proves much of anything...because it doesnt

Also i dont understand why your DH can't have a direct conversation with his daughter about this