Source: Reddit
My mom and stepdad have been together since I was 5, married since I was 6 and I’m now 20. My dad died when I was 5. He and mom were separated but not divorced when he passed away and mom started dating my stepdad a few weeks later. I met him about five months after my dad died, and he moved in with us after a year and they married 14 months after that.
My mom really wanted me to “have a dad” and found my stepdad a good partner and someone who could be a good dad to me. Only I never wanted another dad. So I always called him by his first name and refer to him as my stepdad. He and I have butted heads over this a lot. He thinks I should be his daddy’s little girl. I think it’s crazy that he feels I owe him that, and owed him from the start. It annoys me how often he likes to bring up that my dad’s dead and the fact I hardly remember him, because a lot of my memories faded with time, and when I was 7 my grandpa died, who raised my dad after my grandma died when dad was a baby. So I lost all contact with that side.
The older I get, the worse it gets and even with three boys, he’s still focused on me being his little girl. I have told him that I appreciate him but I won’t ever call him dad.
I spent a lot of time with mom’s parents as a kid and have a bedroom at their house. We had Christmas at their house this year and all morning my stepdad was bringing up these stories of adult stepkids asking stepparents to adopt them and on and on and told me I would be asking him soon enough after all these years. He found this article on FB about a woman asking her stepmom to adopt her, where she talked about it being insulting to call her stepmom, because she was always a mom to her. He said that was him with me, how I only ever had him as a dad, etc. It got on my nerves. I told him to stop, so did grandma who told him nobody wanted to hear about that at Christmas. But he would not let up.
So I went up to my room at my grandparents, grabbed some old art supplies I still had there, and made a sign that said Jason (stepdad’s “name”, you ARE NOT the father of Gracie (me). Think the Maury show and how that was like a meme for a while. When dinner was ready I brought down the sign and gave it to him and told him whenever he needs to remember, he can look at it and adjust his expectations. He was pissed. My grandparents and half brothers laughed. The oldest of my brothers actually said his dad needed something like that because he never seemed to understand it. My mom tried to calm him down but he told me I was an ungrateful and disrespectful little girl who would be sad when he finally gives up caring about me. I told him I never asked him to be a d**k to me but to accept I will never call him dad and will never allow him to adopt me. I told him we could be close if he’d just accept I don’t see him as my dad.
My mom wants me to apologize but my grandparents think he should apologize for always pushing. Am I Wrong? What should I Do?
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