(Warning: long question inside.) How do I build a relationship with my father now that my mother has died?

I don’t know how you will feel about my experience. You and I had a similar childhood, the only difference being that I left home for good at age 16.

My dad finally apologized when he had Alzheimer’s, and by then he was no longer sure what he had done wrong, he just remembered that he had done something wrong.

I never really learned how to be with him in a human way when he was alive, but the point I’m trying to get to is that after he died I was able to remember him fondly, think of him with love, miss him appropriately. Even when I dream about him they are good dreams.

My mom, on the other hand, also abusive, kept her wits until she died at a very old age, stayed abusive, never apologized, took a huge swat at me from beyond the grave, and I still hate her, think of her with anger and bile, can’t forgive her and am glad she’s dead.

So, I know that’s not much to offer, but my dad’s apology did make a hell of a difference.

What a great opportunity for you! Do you realize what a treasure you have at your feet? Almost everyone else in your shoes NEVER gets that repentant phone call from an abusive parent later on in life. It sounds like he’s truly changed, and he needs your forgiveness. He knows it’s a long row to hoe earning your trust and respect again (if ever), but this could be the start of an awesome healing for both of you. Go for it. Just start talking.

One step at a time…

First, be thankful that he sees what he did wrong and that he’s sorry for it. My father will never apologize or admit he’s abused me (physically and mentally), actually he lied to my face about it once when I confronted him. I hated him even more for making me doubt my experiences. He also refuses to change and has been on a continual downward spiral since I stopped speaking to him.

Because of this, I can never forgive him.

However, if he came to me like your dad did, I would be able to open my heart to him again. However, it would have to happen really slowly and he would have to show me by his actions that he really means it.

I know it’s hard to forget horrible things someone did, but occasionally people do change. I wouldn’t dive in head-first, but I would very slowly and carefully give him a chance.

I agree with both Miss Anthrope and stratman37. He’s reaching out, and trying to show you that he has changed. He knows what he did and is truly sorry. He loved your Mom and he loves you, as well—very much. He needs you now, and, wouldn’t it be wonderful if you could forgive, work on the relationship, and be there for each other. Your Mom would want that, I think.

After my Mom past away (a few years ago), my Dad was still self-centered. Always has been and always will be. He didn’t reach out to his kids and we needed him. It’s a gift that you’ve been given. Baby steps, tinyfaery, but, it’ll happen and it will be a good thing.

Big, big hugs to you. xo

I agree as everyone else you should take things slowly. they shall progress in time. I’ve never had that kind of experience with my family so I am hesitant to say anything that will offend you so I’m sorry if I say anything wrong but I’d like to help you as much as I can.

I think that the time you’ll have with your father would change things probably positively in your life. first of all it would mature you greatly for you will have a different or should I say a greater amount of perspective on things, on relations, etc. so the process would mend your scars on this matter and it would probably be a good experience for you. be forgiving. he sounds like he is really sorry about everything and his conscious would be in the way before he says anything to you. if not, you can always remind him.

God will give you the strenght to move on…

My dad was a huge figure in my life. He just didn’t realize it. He wasn’t abusive, but he married a woman who was. I only saw him for a few weeks each year. The rest of the time he mostly ignored me. I really wanted to be a part of his life, but I just wasn’t. I stopped seeing him altogether when I was about 14. It wasn’t until I was in my early 20s that I realized how much this affected me. From the time I was 14 until now, 16 years later, he only made an effort to see me or be a part of my life one time. He came to see my new family shortly after my son was born (ten years ago). I had to provide his information for a security clearance investigation a few years ago, and I actually had to spend several hours looking him up on the internet to find his phone number. When I finally got on the phone with him, I was treated to an awkward conversation that he quickly cut short.

I’ve stopped thinking about him. I can go months without him crossing my mind. When he does, I wonder what I would do if he suddenly showed interest and made an effort to be a part of my life. I’ve long since stopped hating him and being angry at him. I wouldn’t tell him to get lost, but I certainly wouldn’t go out of my way to entertain a relationship. I would leave it almost entirely up to him.

That is my advice to you. I don’t believe a parent has any inherent right to be a part of an adult child’s life, simply by the fact of parenthood. If a parent is loving and supportive throughout your life, I believe that a child owes them respect, love, and a place in their lives (and the lives of their grandchild’s). But when a parent forfeits that right through neglect and/or abuse, it then becomes entirely the parent’s responsibility to earn it back. And the child is not obligated to provide them that opportunity.

If you desire a relationship with your father, give him the opportunity to earn back your love and trust. Be honest with him about how you feel. Guard your heart carefully, but don’t feel an obligation to spare his feelings. You don’t owe him anything.

This is heartbreaking to read.

I wish I knew, @tinyfaery, I wish I knew. All I can say is bless you for even having the empathy toward him to be willing to consider a reconciliation. I wish you both the best (though I’m sorry it had to be this way).

What kind of relationship would you like? Do you want to share holidays together? Do you want to vacation together? Do you want to have Sunday dinners together? Do you want to explore your perceptions of those events in the past and get explanations? Do you want to be chums, and just talk?

I think that if you think about what you want, that will help clear the way forward. Think about what you want without thinking about what is possible. Figure out what your ideal relationship would be. It is only then that you can see what you are willing to do, and what you are not willing to do to build such a relationship.

My relationship with my father has always been tenuous at best. I knew that I had never pleased him, so there was always an edge to our relationship—with me wondering when he might decide it was no longer worth it having me as a son. As a result of that, and also because of distance, I don’t see my parents much. Only on holidays.

My parents bribe us in the summer by renting a house on a very nice lake and inviting us up. Increasingly, those vacations have become more and more filled with tension. Part of this has to do with my wife’s feelings about my father, and part has to do with the way he treats my son. He treats my son like he treated me. I.e., as a case to be brow-beaten into submission.

As a result, we’ve cut back on the amount of time the kids spend with my parents. They had spent three weeks a year there, since they were old enough to be away from home overnight, but now we are reluctant to let them have the kids. We don’t want our son to have a very stressful time. We don’t want my parents trying to fix the failings of our parenting. Heaven forbid. After all, I think we are trying to fix the failings of their parenting.

I’ve never had much of a close relationship with either of my parents because they don’t talk about personal stuff, and they taught us not to do that either. So I’ve given up on that. I’ve grown more angry with him as the years have gone on. But I have remained unable to have any real conversation with him.

So I don’t know what it’s worth to have with my parents now. They are so different and they don’t understand and I have no idea what they are thinking, nor what they want to do with respect to our kids. I’m sure they’ll never ask. They never once mentioned anything to me about the way I was behaving, and whether I was depressed or whatever in the two years I’ve been sick. I don’t know if they didn’t notice anything, or if they just didn’t want to talk about it.

So what do I want? I want the minimum necessary to have a pretend relationship. That’s pretty sad, I guess.

What do you want? The door is wide open for you because there’s been nothing for many years. Hell, you might even find out what he wants! If you’re both adults, and you both know a bit about what you want, maybe you can negotiate a decent relationship.

Anyway, you’ve got a chance to dream. And a chance to try to make your dream happen. That’s something few people have with their parents. Good luck.

It would be hard for me to forgive him and I would say so…I would say that I might consider a relationship but that respect will most certainly have to be earned

@Simone_De_Beauvoir But….going obviously going on the defensive with him, right off the bat, might cause him to withdraw again, for good. As the relationship slowly progresses, she’ll find out if he is re-earning her respect (stating up front that that has to happen won’t make it happen any differently….) plus, eventually, they could get to a time when she can speak openly and honestly about how he hurt her…...you just don’t want to shut it down at the gate, so to speak…..

It’s a personal/indivdual thing here, folks. It’s up to tinyfaery and what she’s comfortable doing or not doing.

I wish her all the best.

@Val123 if it were me, I said…I wouldn’t care too much about rebuilding the relationship

@Val123: There are also ways of wording what Simone said that would be softer and less likely to alienate. If @tinyfaery honestly is interested in building this relationship—and it seems to me like she is, and is just worried that it will backfire or generally end badly—then she ought to lead with that. I’d probably deliberately use the word “worried” or something similar. I’d say that I truly want to forgive him but that it’s going to take some time and effort, which I’m very willing to put in and that he needs to understand it’s not going to be an overnight thing. At that point, if he withdraws, then he was just looking to make himself feel better, not an actual relationship, in which case… perhaps it’s better that he goes away, anyway.

If you really want to build a relationship with him then just go slow and be honest with what you’ve feeling for so long so he’ll know not to expect it to just melt away because he feels genuine remorse, offers apologies and asks for your forgiveness. He’s had the 35 years to feel changes, good for him but you’re not required to forgive him so suddenly… if ever. You do what you can handle, what you feel won’t cause any strife to your life now. It’s touching he likes your wife and was good to your mother but now it’s all about you and him. If it were me then I’d take it very slow and treat him as if he were an acquaintance and see if he warrants becoming a trustworthy friend.

@hungryhungryhortence well said.

I think you answered your own question inadvertently in the last line of your post: Personal Experience.

You will form a new relationship with your dad not through some snap of the finger decision, but through spending positive time with him. he’s an alien and a stranger to you. only through spending time discovering his humanity will you be able to relate with him again. If you want, you can even find out what his reasons were for leaving.

Baby steps. Just say, “It’s going to take time Dad.” and give him opportunities in small doses. Have a holiday meal with him, celebrate his birthday and fathers day with him, but don’t worry about family vacations quite yet. That may come in time as your trust begins to build.

Let him know how angry you still are and make sure he understands that it could take a long time if ever for you to cement a relationship of any kind with him. But also let him know that you’re willing to try, as you clearly are. Don’t do anything you’re not comfortable with. Do things your way; you deserve that.

I have to agree with @Judi, A good starting place is to focus on how good he was to your mother at the end, and how he took care of her. That doesn’t mean that you have to be best buddies, but treat him as you would a relative who was very kind and compassionate to your mother at the end of her life. While that may not make him into “Dad” it certainly could make him worthy of being a friend.

Forgiveness is a two way street. You will gain as much as you give by granting it.

Thanks for the advice all. Maybe I worded my question badly, because I was looking for more practical suggestions, I guess.

The forgiveness came easily. Watching my mom die made me realize that we all did the best we could, given the circumstances we all faced. I caused my mother so much pain and anguish when I was young, and my dad told me that she had forgiven me for everything. I forgave her, so I figure I can forgive him.

Thing is, my psyche still fears my father and my unconscious reactions to him cause me anxiety. Calling him seems physically impossible. I can’t get myself to dial the phone. My wife says I should invite him to our house for dinner, but WTF will we talk about?

@daloon I asked myself that question, and I just don’t know. All I know of fathers is my own and those on TV and in the movies. What does a relationship with one’s father look like?

@tinyfaery Now you know that every relationship with a father is different.

This is up to you. Are you curious? Do you want to understand what he was thinking? Do you want to see what his life is like? Do you want to play family holidays?

I think you should start with what you really want, no matter how blue sky it is. Do you want him to suffer? Do you want him to understand you? Do you want to know where you came from?

Once you have an idea of your fantasy of the relationship, you can they try to make some of it real.

Or, you could ask fluther to tell you what they think your relationship should look like.

According to the question, you do want some kind of relationship—but until you know what kind, you really can’t build it. You might sort of bounce along and see what happens, but somehow, I don’t think that will satisfy you. I think you do have some wants in this. The only thing to do is to find out what they are, and that kind of mean letting yourself be vulnerable enough to feel what your emotions are telling you.

That’s probably pretty scary. I don’t know what to say. If you want a relationship that means anything, I think you have to feel your fears and your other feelings. Out of that will come the knowledge of what you want. If you won’t or can’t do that, then I would go for a minimalist relationship, as if he were an old acquaintance that you feel obligated to be nice to, but aren’t really interested in connecting to. Who knows, after some years, you might come to trust each other enough to have more.

That’s the other thing. This is a long term investment. Do you want to do that? Don’t take this question without serious thought. I think you really have to want a relationship with him, or you’re wasting your time, and inviting more pain.

I’ve been thinking about this some more. It seems to me that you have to build some kind of trust for anything to work. You get anxious around him, and that’s very unpleasant. What I’d want to know is why he realized what he’d done, and how he decided it was a bad thing. I think that I would test him, over and over. I would put him on the spot and ask him very hard questions. I would tell him how he makes you feel (you have to do this from a self-sufficient place), and see how he reacts. Is he truly repentant? He’ll have to listen then. If he gets defensive, then I would think there is no point.

You’ll have your wife there, so if he does lapse into old patterns, you will have protection and you can get the hell out. For that reason, I wouldn’t invite him to your home. I might take him to a restaurant, but your home is too intimate to invite a former invader into.

But if you establish any kind of relationship, it has to happen over a long time (years), and I think you have to hear his story in detail, and he has to hear yours. Without that, there will be too much baggage to get past. It will be very difficult, I think. At least, it would be for me. It is for me.

I can’t and never have spoken honestly and openly with my father. I can’t tell him what he did to me. It’s too intimate. It would make me much too vulnerable and I just don’t trust him. We see the world too differently. For me, getting together a few times a year and making nice is about as much as I want, and about as much as I think is possible. It is always tense for me to be in his presence (although not nearly so much as with you and your father).

Actually, it makes me very sad to think about this. It seems so unfair and wrong. But there it is, and I don’t think it can ever be any better. As far as I know, he still doesn’t really love me. Maybe he wants to, but doesn’t know how. Well, I’m not going to teach him. That, again, would make me too vulnerable.

But you’re different. Maybe you’ll be able to get what you want—once you figure out what it is. My dream is that my father would realize what he did, and try to explain it (probably that he didn’t know any better), and that he would try to share his real feelings and want to hear about mine. I don’t know if I could ever truly believe him. He’s a funny guy. Good with social situations. He not good at expressing love.

Practically speaking: Communicate via email for now. Use email to ask him to call you, when you’d like to take that further. Set up dinner (or just coffee!) at a neutral location Daloon is on to something with his restaurant suggestion. Connect on facebook, or some other low-risk social type of site. Short interactions, virtual or real, over a period of time may help you let down your guard a bit.

And now the not-so-practical: If all of this stresses you out entirely too much, that’s no good. Why have a relationship at all if it causes you more harm than good? You can always let him know that you forgive him, but can’t handle a relationship at this late date.

Whatever the outcome is, I hope it brings you some closure and some peace. {hugs} to you, friend.

I concur with @augustlan‘s suggestion about sticking to e-mail or written communication for now. Meeting at a coffee shop on Saturday or Sunday mornings for a brief encounter would help establish parameters for a relationship. Having him at your home at this point is too much invasion into your safe place.

How would you feel about going to family counseling with him, and work out the past in that arbitrated space? Getting to have your say, and having your feelings validated by a third party, could be helpful in giving you perspective or closure to the past.

@tinyfaery Well, perhaps you could schedule a movie after dinner. That would help take the burden of “talking” off of everyone.

It also sounds like your wife is the type of person who could help make interactions go smoother. Keep her close.

Please let us know how it progresses…