AITA for telling my dad I won’t let him damage my daughter the way he damaged me and kicking him out?
These past months and an argument during Christmas (oh such peaceful days) have kinda split my family and I’m curious whether I was TA, so here goes.
I (36F) am a single mom to Eve (6F). She was unplanned (I was told I couldn’t have children) and her dad and I have been separated since she was 2, but co-parent okay-ish. She’s with me almost fulltime except for 1 night every 2 weeks.
My father (69M) is single, him and my mom divorced little over 10 years ago. Him and I have always had a rocky relationship. For as long as I can remember, my younger sister has been the wonder child and I was that other daughter. His nickname for me as a child was “biggie” and he would always comment on my weight. This made me have some serious eating issues during puberty and to this day I have trouble with eating. Also, I was never fat and he has been morbidly obese for as long as I can remember.
Besides this, my father has always had a weird jealousy when it came to me getting attention. Every single year, on my birthday, he would be sick (or “sick”) causing me to have to cancel everything and be miserable. Especially as a child this made me so sad, because I couldn’t understand why he did this. He missed my graduation, “forgot” to pick me up from the airport after a holiday, the list goes on. All these things didn’t happen to my sister. Moreover, I had to get a job at 14 to pay for anything fun I wanted to do. This is absolutely fine and I am convinced it’s normal for teens to learn about making and spending money, but at the same time my sister got spending money from him and only got a job at 19 because she wanted to travel.
My mom was very different and definitely did treat my sister and I the same, but she was always the main breadwinner and was abroad for her work the majority of the time, so my father pretty much got to do what he wanted. Whenever I would tell my mom about things he did or said to me, my father would lie and say that I was talking cr*p. This was one of the reasons they got a divorce though, as my mom was able to see through more and more of his BS.
When I was 20, I got my college degree and in the same month I moved abroad. I lived there for about 2 years, and during those years I did stay in close contact with my mom and sister, and they visited me there, but I never spoke to my father. This NC was fine with me, and I don’t really think he gave a damn either. When I moved back to my home country and got my own place (about 15 minutes from where he lived) he never visited either and I pretty much only spoke to him on family gatherings.
In 2014, my parents divorced. Suddenly my dad tried to visit me all the time, sitting on my couch crying about how my mom suddenly left him and it was unfair because he did nothing wrong and never saw it coming. My sister and I caught him in numerous lies during those times, trying to make my mom look bad, but when we called him out he would just deny having said anything.
During his divorce, I was going through some pretty big health issues, including a scary few days where doctors were scared it could be cancer. Every time my father would visit and I would try to tell him about my life, he wouldn’t listen and just suddenly start talking about how sad he was and completely ignore my stories. After a few months of this I cut him off for a while again.
In 2019 my daughter was born. Besides always complaining about how I “picked” the wrong dad for my kid, he seemed to be an okay grandfather. He did refuse to hold her for the first 1,5 years, but I blamed this on him being scared he might hurt her.
Unfortunately, over the past year, I have seen my father resort to the same behaviour he had when I was young. On Eve’s birthday he did visit but said he had horrible back and leg pain and made everybody jump through hoops to help him. He talked through us singing for her and her blowing out her candles, stealing her attention. He also “forgot” to buy her a present. I don’t know why but I saw that coming, so I already bought a present he could give her, but the hurt was there. He also started being more negative towards her, for example when she would proudly tell him about something she learned in school and he would answer things like “and how many kids in your class could already do that?”. I became more cautious as to not leave her alone with him.
During Christmas came the straw that finally broke the camels back. We were sitting down having dinner, and when Eve wanted to help herself to another portion of I don’t even know what, he literally put his hand on her arm and said “are you sure you should eat more? You’re gonna look like Peppa Pig”. The whole table went silent for a minute and then I absolutely lost my shit. I told him to get the f*ck out of my house, that I wouldn’t let him damage Eve the way he did with me, and that he can forget about visiting again until he could explain to me what he think he did wrong and apologise to both Eve and me. My father tried to claim he didn’t say anything, but I wasn’t having it and kicked him out.
Now, my sister and BIL are saying I went too far and was too harsh, but I still feel like I was in the right. My sis says he doesn’t do it on purpose but I honestly don’t give a sh*t whether he does or doesn’t, I just want to protect Eve.
So, AITA?
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