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The mature thing to do would be to tell them something like “I can see that you’re trying and I appreciate that, but I don’t know if I can like or respect you after what you did to my mom and my family. I’ll let you know if that changes but I’m not ready to have you mother me, I can and will cook my own dinner for the foreseeable future.” however be advised this could cause more hurt and lead to escalation because some people can’t handle rejection even when it’s honest and will either desperately seek approval anyway or reject you back. Given what you said about her age she may not even be emotionally mature herself.
Also you’re under no obligation to be mature about it. You’re allowed to be an asshole if you want. Cheaters and homewreckers and broken family creators are some of the worst things in the world to me. As someone who was raised in a broken home I really have little sympathy for the people who don’t understand that having children is a commitment, not just personally but to their whole relationship. They’re not just possessions you get custody of and get to drag around on your own personal life journey.
I’m not religious but I think this is one of the things that religion was trying to accomplish by making marriage such a sacred thing and divorce so restricted and children out of wedlock so disapproved of. The “nuclear” family was a secular version of the same principle. Yes, all that had unintended consequences too but if you are not prepared to raise children with a person you should not be having children with them. Yeah, “people change” but your commitments do not. That’s why they’re called commitments. If you’re not going to follow through on your commitments you’d better have some really damn good reason to be causing such lasting damage to your child. It can be justified in some cases, but I think it’s pretty rare that it actually is justified. Children deserve a stable and lasting family environment. I think that’s a big part of why foster care is generally such a disastrous failure too. How do we fix this? I don’t know, but I know it starts with the parents being responsible.
meco03211@lemmy.world 1 year ago
I’d argue some of this depends on how old you are. Hypothetically if you’re very young and there’s a lot of deeper issues between your father and mother, it might not be best to try to explain a lot of that to you. Young kids aren’t going to really grasp the nuance of certain things or shouldn’t be burdened with something like “your mother was horribly abusive to me and also cheating, and I needed a way out as I was emotionally wrecked myself”. That example is a bit extreme to be fair. But from that you might get a sense for when that scenario should be revealed to the child (likely as an adult), or depending on how far reality departs from that example when would be an appropriate time.
Now on the other end of the hypothetical spectrum, if you’re older and your dad was just an asshole cheating for fun, I can see that being a justifiable reason to cut them off (situationally dependent).
Odds are you land somewhere between these. If you don’t have friends or other family to talk to about it, it might behoove you to try and get some professional counseling. And understand that someone else could go through the exact same situation as you and come to a different conclusion and that doesn’t mean either of you are wrong.