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The original was posted on /r/twoxchromosomes by /u/Trynanotbeinpain on 2023-09-09 11:46:36.

Long vent. Tl:dr; golden child realizes her beloved dad wants to have the emotional benefits of modern fatherhood while maintaining the power of a traditional patriarch. Feel free to share your similar vents in the comments.

I was a daddy’s girl growing up. My dad is a very gentle personality. He’s a funny and highly pious guy who likes fart jokes, loves kids, and couldn’t physically hurt a fly. It’s why my very religious mom chose him as the father of her children all those years ago. When I was growing up, she was the “disciplinarian” whereas my dad was the one sneaking us ice cream once in a while. I had a blissful childhood as the first grandchild of an immigrant family.

When I started becoming a teenager my relationship with my dad shifted. I stopped being able to really talk to him about my ideas because I got in trouble several times when I expressed things he disagreed with. “Getting in trouble” was a big deal because it meant I might end up pulled out of school (which was blamed as a bad influence). As a teen I chalked this dynamic between us up to a culture/generation gap, and did my best to instead make him happy through the languages we shared, i.e. by doing my best at school and being religiously excellent throughout high school and college. He was very proud of me.

During this time as “golden daughter” I began to slowly recognize a lot of issues with my dad, as any child does when they come of age and find out their parents aren’t infallible. I noticed that under the surface of my parents’ relationship were long term conflicts that I suspected might eventually cause a divorce - e.g. my mother was taking on a “double shift” while my dad belittled her housework. I noticed that my paternal uncles were all ending up divorced one by one because they all have a badly enmeshed relationship with their mother. And I noticed that my father treated any “tough conversations” as though they were extremely shameful to him - e.g. refusing to transparently discuss money during college application season.

Things came to a head between me and my dad a few years back. About five years after college when I was living away from home, I got up the gumption to drop the bomb on both my parents that I decided to stop practicing their religion. In the following years, my mom obviously still wants me to practice again but she has accepted that my journey with faith is my own and not a “rejection” of my parents. But my dad has begun a major midlife crisis and very clearly blames it on me. I’m the “disobedient daughter who has shamed him and rejected everything he stands for and made him go on anxiety meds” etc etc etc. He’s genuinely confused why we’re not very emotionally close because according to him he’s never hit me or yelled at me so I should feel comfortable always talking to him 🙃🙃🙃

Here’s the thing - I’ve been looking back on my family life and as much as I love my dad, I’m calling bullshit. If I walked back home tomorrow and piously did everything he wanted, I wouldn’t magically solve his midlife crisis and make him happy nor would we be emotionally close. Because he’s not happy nor emotionally close with the family members who ARE following all his rules - my mother and my brothers. He is lashing out horrifically against my mom and I think they’re on the brink of divorce. His sons care about him, but feel that he is impossible to communicate with. Brief example - my brother is a biology major who has been working for years in neuroscience labs. Did my dad listen to his highly educated advice about COVID safety? Nope! Fully ignored his son in favor of his friends’ advice despite his wife being extremely high risk, and ended up giving her COVID despite us begging him to mask.

Looking at all this, it suddenly clicked for me - my dad cares about us all but he doesn’t seem to fundamentally respect us as fellow adults. It’s like there’s a switch in his brain for what types of adults he respects and listens to, and what types of adults he talks down to. Men who perform piety in a specific way - wow very respectable. His wife and children - not so much. He seems to think that because he’s “nice” to us that means that we should all be very emotionally close to him, despite him still treating us like a traditional patriarch does in terms of deciding that his rationale is alway more worthy than ours by default.

Just an extremely shitty set of realizations to come to about your father. I recognize that this isn’t a reflection on him specifically so much as it is a generational shift. After all he grew up with "traditional’ dads all around him beat their kids, and he actively decided to not be violent to his own children physically or verbally. But I don’t think that’s an excuse for how he’s been acting lately. Anyways. I was mulling over it and just wanted to vent.