When I was 11, my dad made all the arrangements for me to sit the scholarship exam at our local girls private school. I was a very bright kid, attending a state school that was trying its best but was weighed down by all the usual issues of providing education in an area of deep socioeconomic deprivation.
I passed the exam and was offered a full scholarship, my parents would’ve only needed to pay for my uniform and any extracurricular activities. My dad told everyone — including me — that I was moving to the private school. My grandma offered to pay for the uniform. My (much more affluent) best friend’s parents moved her to the private school in anticipation of keeping us together. He wouldn’t allow my mum and grandma to deal with it without his involvement and he was violent, so my mum wouldn’t have dared do it without his permission.
Then he just… changed his mind. He refused to explain why, just said I wasn’t going. He was an abusive prick to my me, my mum, and my siblings, so it wasn’t the first time he dropped a bomb in our lives, but 30 years on this still stings. I have children of my own and, whilst I don’t agree with the private school system as an adult, I can’t imagine putting my child through the stress of exams, telling them they were moving school, and then yanking the rug from under them. It wasn’t the first or last time he’d done something like that, I was horse obsessed as a kid and his other favourite trick was to take me to look at ponies for sale, hype me up about them, arrange stabling etc and then tell me at the last minute that I couldn’t have them.
How unreasonable am I to harbour this resentment three decades on? I’m NC with my dad — have been since he pressured me to take a particular degree course with an offer to fund the postgrad qualification and then changing his mind once again — so I can’t even ask him why he did this. Do I just accept that he was a narcissist and this was an amusing little game for him?