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.

Or perhaps he has put his biological daughter first for the first time since he got together with the OP. Either could be true, and we just don't know.

Or you could RTFT.

The detail in this thread doesn’t change that opinion.

we have one side of a clearly very fractured family story.

a dad who ‘visited’ his two children and took them on holiday while he lived with OP and acted as full time dad to her daughter.

We have one story of a nasty nickname during the teen years. No understanding of what other behaviors were at play. The he daughter using her step dads surname and the son not liking it. The son not thinking for his step mum and step sister as aunt and grandmother to his children (which technically they aren’t and they don’t have the affectionate relationship to assume that).!

clealry the son didn’t and doesn’t accept OP and her daughter.

the daughter clearly also has issues with her playing father at the wedding.

we don’t have anything near a clear picture. Because it’s a single viewpoint of the woman who desperately (and understandably) wants to erase her daughter’s biological father from her life and replace him with other her step dad. Any signaling from the other children to the contrary is a massive problem to her.

There are two sides to every story. And neither will be 100% true

They are invited to the wedding, had bedrooms to stay over as they wished, now come into the OP and their Dad's home for BBQs, are remembered when it comes to drink preferences etc. They are permitted to be rude and to treat family (by marriage) as randoms.
Exclusion and unacceptance is taking place, and will now affect the SD wedding.

Giving in to petty demands is not putting anyone first. There are literally no circumstances in which this demand would be reasonable.

My DSF walked me down the aisle at my request. He made a speech with me as both an individual and his DSD, not as his DD. If he, or my DSSs had wanted to keep this role as just between them I would not have had any problem accepting this. He is their Dad after all. I have and will always regard their relationship with him as being of primary importance and would never attempt to get in the way of it, or take that away from them. Nor would my DM have encouraged it.

The father and his DD’s relationship appears to be in tatters, for whatever reason. There are many that I can imagine. He understandably doesn’t want to lose her completely now that he is aware.

From the OP’s posts, his DD has not made any demands. Maybe she was hoping that he would think of her unprompted and talk with her about how she was feeling about everything, before making plans? The fact that this hasn’t happened is perhaps a clue as to why this mess has come about. It doesn’t come across that the adults really took into consideration the three children’s feelings and concerns during their upbringing. If everyone was just being well behaved and polite, this appears to have been enough for them.

One side of the story is true of any thread on here.

Her stepfather has prioritized his child.

He may not consider his stepdaughter to be equal to his actual children, but that doesn’t mean they don’t have a relationship she clearly values and wouldn’t want to lose. There’s a whole spectrum between ‘all’ and ‘nothing’.

Of course it’s putting his daughter first.

It may be petty to you, but it is obviously hugely meaningful to his daughter. Having been made aware of that, he’s chosen not to do something that would hurt her immensely and cost him his relationship with her.

Well you see I don't think you are right. He hasn't prioritised (I prefer the UK spelling) his child, for the simple reason his "child" doesn't actually want him to do anything she just (allegedly) wants to issue princessy dictates about what he CAN'T do. In my own family such behaviour would be given short shrift.
My own husband also has a bio and a step daughter and if he had promised his step daughter that he would do something this meaningful and important, hell would freeze over before he would back out of it because of demands from anyone else - Including his bio daughter. It is called honouring your promises and being a decent person. He and I would both have a word with the offending daughter and tell her that while we love her dearly, she was bang out of order and was risking ruining the other one's wedding.

In the circumstance where he spent most of her childhood ignoring her, hardly ever having her under the same roof, whilst simultaneously having multiple first daddy daughter moments with his new perfect family?

I have. In particular the OP's reply where she describes how fucking little time and effort he put into his own children after he met her.

This is pure assumption and appears to somewhat contradict what the OP said. Even if true - no it does not excuse petty spite and emotional blackmail which are never excusable and ought never to be rewarded.
A lot of people with serious daddy issues projecting on this thread methinks.

Nah, I was lucky enough to have a dad who actually cares about his children, and didn't decide to play extra special second family games. But I see a lot of children who have been fucked over by their father, and it seriously fucks them up.

Do I need you to think I’m right?

She hasn’t issued any diktats, princessy or otherwise. She has her feelings, and her mother and brother made her father aware of them (seemingly without her knowledge). As a result of now having this information, he’s decided he doesn’t want to hurt her and lose his relationship.

Ah yes, telling someone they’re ’bang out of order’ immediately obliges them to fall into line. Or not. In this particular family, OP’s DH made a promise/agreed to do something before he had all pertinent information available to him. In light of receiving said info, he’s reevaluated and judged that the consequences of keeping his promise would be far more negative than not keeping it, regardless of how righteous the former may make him feel at the time.

How is saying to someone that if they follow through on a promise they have made, even though it actually doesn't really impact on me, I will end my relationship with you - not a dictate?
I also didn't claim that telling someone they were bang out of order would make them fall in line. I would however do it if in the same position as the OP because said daughter would need a reality check. It's like she's being a bridezilla when she's not even the bride.

It does impact on her. Not thinking it to be a big deal does not mean that it isn’t one to her. It evidently is, and her father choosing to share a special-father daughter moment with someone who isn’t his daughter is something she would find hugely hurtful to the point of being relationship ending.

She expressed her feelings to her mother and brother, not her father. They took it upon themselves to speak to him. She isn’t aware that they have. Even if she did speak directly to him, he’s a grown man with agency fully capable of deciding for himself how he wanted to proceed. That you don’t agree with what he’s chosen to do does not mean that he was incapable of saying no if he wanted to.

You mean his actual daughter? Of course he has. What good parent wouldn't put their own child first.

I love the way op is expected to act like a robot with no feelings by some.
She has now got to tell her daughter that she can’t have the wedding she wanted and not only that she also isn’t allowed to bring the conversation up with her step daughter or her husband.
She just has to except it and that’s that, she’ll walk her daughter down the aisle and her husband can watch.. Yet nobody is allowed to air their opinion incase it offends anyone.
The bio daughter, her brother and her mum have had years to have this conversation yet they waited until weeks before someone’s wedding day.
Even if I can sort of understand the step daughters point of view it’s been left to late and should have been spoken about years ago.
If this were my husband I’d be sympathetic to the position he has been put in but if he then refused to let me at least try to talk to his daughter and completely shut down all conversation I think I’d be thinking about divorce to. You’re not being unreasonable op, I’m sorry they are trying to ruin your daughter’s day.

Any good parent would not be breaking promises because of demands borne of spiteful jealousy, regardless of who is making the demands.
This should not be a case of the bio daughter trumping the step one in some sort of absurd loyalty hierarchy. His daughter is making unreasonable demands and asking too much. Giving in to her is making her step sister feel worthless and insignificant at her own wedding.
I also very much believe this will only be the beginning of the demands. If the step daughter has kids the OP's husband will no doubt start to have restrictions on how he is allowed to be as a step grandparent imposed on him by his children. Threats will be issued on a regular basis. He needs to make a stand now or be in thrall to emotional blackmail for the rest of his days.
If the daughter would really cut ties over this she is either an exceptionally spiteful person or needs some sort of therapy.
I still think everyone involved sitting down together and actually talking this through is what might make a solution possible.

Or, rather than being spiteful for the sake of it, over something she doesn’t really think is a big deal, she’s expressing that her father doing something symbolically very meaningful to her with someone who isn’t his daughter, is something she would find deeply hurtful.

A good parent imo would be taking that seriously, and reevaluating whether or not to proceed in doing something that would hurt their child. I also don’t think that wanting a special father -daughter experience to be kept for them as father and only daughter is asking too much either.

Therapy isn’t some miracle cure - all that can be utilized to make someone adopt any one perspective. Nor is ‘sitting down and talking’ guaranteed to achieve a favorable resolution for anyone. Actually, it can make things worse, particularly if you’re talking about something that’s been shared in confidence.

A ‘solution’ has already been found, it just isn’t one you like. Sometimes you can’t make everyone happy, you can only decide what loss you would best prefer to live with, and you prioritize who you want to hurt the least. It also doesn’t follow that this is the start of her throwing her weight around, especially when she hasn’t even thrown her weight around here.

A quick update I asked my daughter if I could walk her down the aisle; she wasn’t really keen and said she wanted a traditional wedding, she said when her friend’s mother had walked her friend down the aisle it highlighted that her father was dead and people had become emotional. she felt that it would be giving some weird attention to her biological father who was a loser. I then bottled it and didn’t tell her what had happened. I know I am a coward.

Well last week husband cooked for his daughter at her house as she had a late duty, apparently they chatted away and watched an episode of a comedy on iPlayer that is their ‘thing’. As they were loading the dishwasher she asked him whether he had been asked to do anything for my daughter’s wedding and before he could answer told him that it wasn’t acceptable to her and she would be really hurt and upset. So it’s now out in the open from the horse’s mouth as it were.

He said it was difficult as she didn’t have a father. Stepdaughter asked how he would have felt if her stepfather was alive and she had asked him instead of my husband. She said it was putting my daughter on the same level as her. I am devastated by that comment.

I insisted he had to tell my daughter himself which he did yesterday . It was very emotional and they were both crying.

My son-in-law was very good and kept us all calm.

My daughter wanted a man to walk her (please no comments about this) and toyed with my brother in law, or even son- in- law’s dad but at the end I am going to do it.

No more to say but I hope to God my step kids make a decision not to come, stepson said at the beginning that they’re normally away at that time when they were first told but daughter-in-law is pregnant so won’t want to be abroad.

That’s really awful. Why is it any different than if she had a bio sister. If you and oh had had another child.
Your oh should have told his daughter that his stepdaughter is on the same level as her. Awful behaviour from them all

Ask them not to come . In fact tell your husband , he owes your daughter as much so he can uninvite them . Please don’t feel you owe your step children any respect regarding your daughter’s wedding , they had nil respect for your daughter and nil empathy despite knowing her father is dead . No matter how many excuses people choose to give here , they are both adults , they are choosing to be mean and awful towards your daughter , you or your daughter owe them no sympathy or even cordial behaviour from hen it comes to YOUR daughter big day .
I hope you can overcome this , my husband has been my daughters “dad “since she was 3 , if he did this to her down the line I don’t think I could overcome it and would always be resentful , it would end my marriage .

Feel for you and your daughter. I believe in karma and one day your step daughter will realise how hurtful she has been