Dad wants me to meet a woman he has been seeing

[footballagain]

Urgh. I don't know how to start this.........

It's next Friday.

Mum got her terminal diagnosis 26 months ago and passed away end October 2013. Before Christmas dad told me about a woman he had befriended. Then a month ago broached me meeting her. Next Friday.

I'm struggling with it. I don't want to lose my dad but I am finding this really tough.

I've got loads to say sometimes but have found myself completely tongue tied now I've tried to post about it!

I miss my mum.

Foot - you sound such a thoughtful sensitive person - you deserve better. You've had two major bereavements in a short time and you are still so young. I was much older than you when my mum died( 12 years ago) and I can still vividly recall the desolate, ineffable feeling of sadness that would overwhelm me. In E.M. Forster's novel, Howard's End, the bereaved father marries again and the grown up children are devastated - the author says something like ' a wife you can replace, a mother never'. You've behaved very well and I'm sure you want you df to be happy again - it's just about the time you need ( and I would venture to say he does) to grieve your mother properly.

It is always going to be difficult. I lost my Dad a couple of years ago but would love Mum to meet someone to take her out and love her as much as Dad did and make her smile again.

Oh Foot - what an insensitive thing for him to say

I'm not surprised you're angry.

Well done for getting through it. It sounds like a frankly awful evening, even without the fact that you're dealing with your loss.

If it was me, I'd have a serious chat with husband about how, 4 months on from losing your mum, it has fuck all to do with you being 'awkward'. It sounds like he thinks you should just shut up and 'get over it'. Can I assume he's never had to deal with a close loss himself?

He needs a wakeup call. You're doing your damnedest to keep going and act ok in front of everyone else. It's not a lot to hope your partner might actually be emotionally supportive, and not leave you to talk to the woman without any help, laugh at her dragging you up onto a dancefloro when it is not your kind of thing, and then blame you for not bering fine about it all.

Oh and your colleague is also an arsehole, but people often are. Husbands are supposed to know you a bit better than that.

I'm sorry if I portrayed my husband in a really bad light last night. He was an arse, no getting away from it, and I told him so.

A lot of you have said the same thing in different ways - ways that make sense to you, and that have made sense to me, and have touched me.

I do feel very lost, it's a very consuming grief.

I did manage to have a sensible conversation with my husband today. We agree, she wasn't quite right. Maybe my 'odd' radar is working after all...

Oh and yeah, my colleague is an arsehole

Perhaps when your husband said you were being awkward what he actually meant was I find this all difficult and strange and wish things weren't so I will say DW is being awkward rather then the situation as it was my MIL who died and not my Mum. Maybe your dh is grieving too and wants to support you but can't express his own grief at the same time.

I really feel for you foot

My mum died almost 6 years ago very suddenly. My dad was on dating websites within a week and 3 weeks after my mum died tried to move one of her friends in. My sister and I arranged bereavement counselling, he came back from that saying that the counsellor said that he was fine and that she (the counsellor) "fancied" him We both live next door and so he had plenty of support. We then went though a procession of women, several at the same time. He wanted to move another 2 in in that first 6 months. I don't think that either of us have ever forgiven him for the emotional rollercoaster he put us through. We were a very close family and the total disregard he had for us and the memory of mum was something that I can't forgive. I remember him saying that these things were ok because our loss wasn't as big or important as his and we just had to suck it up. We weren't allowed to grieve for our mum in those early days because we were so worried about him - our grief was like an empty wound and Dad would keep poking at it by insisting that we met all these women. He dragged them to all our family occasions and insisted they were treated like our mum. It made us both so angry.

After about 3 years it calmed down a bit. The current one he has been with quite a while.

It's ok to feel angry about this. You are not strange or odd. It's normal to feel loyalty to your mum. Whilst he will get on with his life, as my dad did and is probably still is grieving it doesn't give anyone an excuse to behave in a way that really hurts another family member.