It took me a long time in my life to disown my father forever, for good, not looking back ever, and I am so much happier since I did. I did spend months or even a full year not talking to the guy and not taking his calls, but my mom always made me feel guilty after some time, until I was able to tell her: “Mom, I want him gone from my life forever, I don’t want to see him ever again or speak with him ever again and if you even mention him again, I’m also cutting you out of my life.”
I was so harsh with my mother because that was the only way to make her back off, to make her understand how much the man she married (and gave me his genetic information) hurt me, every time I saw him. He was physically and emotionally abusive to me until I was 12 years old. At that age, he hit me and I was so angry because he had hit me just for existing, that I hit back and the next thing I knew, I had supernatural strength from the adrenaline and he was on the floor begging that I stop hitting him. After that time, he never hit me again but the emotional abuse continued.
He was also economically abusive, to my mom and later to me when I started working at 16. He stole money I was saving to buy something I wanted, and when I confronted him, he said he had every right to take that money since he had fed me and gave me a roof for 16 years. He also said that everything I owned was his, and he had the right to keep my stuff when I moved out. I had to sneak out at 2 a.m with just a bag of clothes, in order to move out of there.
When I was in my 20s, he insisted that I had to break up with my boyfriend and introduced me to random guys telling me “you should be dating him instead of your boyfriend” (luckily not in front of the guys, but still). However, the worse came when he found out that I was bisexual and not dating men anymore. He confronted me about it at a restaurant and I admitted it. He started yelling and I thought he was going to stab me with the knife, and I believe he had the thought but noticed everyone at the restaurant was looking at him and didn’t do it. I left and that’s when I didn’t speak to him for a year, until my mom insisted that he had “changed” and that he “accepted” my relationship. Of course he never did and he made plentiful of hurtful comments, both to me and my partner.
Every time I saw my father in my adult life, he would pretend to be nice for a while and then at some point he’d yell to me or say something hurtful, I cut him out of my life for months, and then my mother would again do the show of “but he chaaaaaaaaaaanged!”. He never did change of course. He didn’t apologize, not even once. Every time I confronted him about how badly he treated me, what I told him was “I’m willing to forgive and forget the past but I need you to understand how you hurt me, so you don’t do it anymore”. Every time I told him that, he’d start speaking about his own childhood and how his childhood was so difficult for him, and never acknowledged or validated my feelings or his own role about the difficulties in my childhood.
The last straw for me was a few years ago. He was in the hospital, in intensive care, but they allowed two people at a time to visit. I went in with my father in law. My father started insulting my FIL and my partner (who wasn’t there but still). When we left, my FIL was generous and told me “don’t worry about what he told me, it was probably the medication”. But I knew that it wasn’t true and that every word that my father had said, was exactly what he thought. And I decided to protect myself and protect the family I choose. And that’s why I’ll never see the man again and when he dies I won’t be to his funeral, I just don’t care about him. He made me not care.