I cut all contact with my father about 1,5 years ago. I was never abused, and my dad is not a bad man, for which I’m glad. Obviously there are other people with far more pressing reasons to cut contact with a parent. My father and I just never really “bonded”.

My parents split up when I was a new-born. I never lived with my father, and I was raised mostly by my brother’s dad (who is my true father figure). Once every two weeks I had to spend the weekend with my biological father, during which he took me to my grandparents and we did fun things, like day trips and such. Not so bad, when I was a child.

Even though I’m sure he loves me, he never really showed an interest in me as a person. I was his daughter, but he never asked me about my grades, my friends, my hobbies, or my boyfriends. The older I got, the more awkward those visits became, as there was nothing to talk about. Usually we just watched a lot of tv, while he fell asleep on the couch until it was time to take me home to my mother.

As an adult, the visits were still awkward, but he became very meddlesome in my “grown-up” decisions. He felt as though he had the right to tell me what to do. I appreciate good advice, but he just always went too far, even becoming angry when I made an important decision without telling him. He expected me to follow his opinion about my carreer, or about buying things like a house or a car, blindly.

The breaking point came when I was renovating my house and he was fighting me on every decision. He was calling me non-stop, starting as early as 6.30AM, even on Sundays. He duplicated a key to my house without asking. He showed up unannounced AND (explicitly) uninvited. It was exhausting. It was toxic. I was very quickly approaching a nervous breakdown. I was crying all the time. On multiple occassions I asked him to stop, but he couldn’t and wouldn’t. He just didn’t respect my boundaries. The last conversation we had was after he had tried to contact my builders behind my back to get them to stop working. So I ceased all communication, and I’m so much happier for it.

I’m no longer anxious because I have to invite him only out of obligation and count down the minutes for him to leave. And I can finally live my life like the 34-year-old adult that I am, instead of him treating me like a child that is stupid and incapable of deciding things on her own. He bad-mouthed me to the entire family, since he thinks I’m just an ungrateful daughter, but I never really connected with them anyway. The only real victim here is my grandmother, who believes everything he says. I regret not having contact with her, but to her I’m just the bad seed now…