Ask dhavalrsarvaiya!

Please excuse the hostile title of my question, but I am VERY angry right now. I want to warn you in advance that this writing might make me sound like a truly terrible person, but like I said, I'm extremely angry and fed up at the moment with my parents and my situation.

My parents have one of the worst marriages I've personally ever seen in my life. I don't understand why they ever got married in the first place or why they have stayed married for as long as they have. It's against our religion for them to get divorced, but there are many times that I feel like they, and the rest of our family, would be better off if they got separated or something. I don't think that's against their beliefs.

If I had to tell you everything wrong with their marriage, I'd be writing all night. There are numerous ways that my parents marriage sucks, but basically, they're distant, secretive, rude, verbally abusive, and vindictive. They spend entirely too much time apart, they leave each other out of things they do with their friends that they should do together, they keep secrets from each other, they call each other names that I've never called my worst enemy, and they do things just to make each other angry. Their marriage is constantly getting worse instead of better because when one of them gets angry at the other, instead of talking about it like normal people, they just get revenge on each other.

My parents scared me out of ever wanting to get married. I know they don't have a normal marriage and I know it's possible to get married and be extremely happy with your spouse, but even so, I just never could get up the guts to bite the bullet and commit my life to another person PERMANENTLY not knowing for certain what our marriage would look like one day. I am a Christian like my parents and if I did get married, I couldn't run to get divorced as quickly as some people do. I could get separated, but only if I was desperate and my husband and I would still be joined together legally. Also, the fact that I grew up watching my parents dysfunctional marriage and have never really, closely seen what a good marriage looks like kept me from having confidence in myself to know how to be a good wife and make a marriage work.

I always wanted a family, but when I kept chickening out of marriage, I decided just to have kids on my own using both IVF and adoption. I now have a large family that I'm raising by myself and I'm extremely happy with my life choices most of the time. But on occasion, I do feel sad that I don't have a husband and my kids don't have a dad. They have father figures, but not a legit dad in their lives. I feel bad about that, especially for the boys, but what can I do now? Who wants to marry a single mother raised in a dysfunctional family who doesn't even know what a healthy marriage looks like. Even if someone did, there's not a counselor in the world that could assuage my fears about marriage.

The reason I came here is that my parents are constantly putting me in the middle of their arguments and I get SICK OF IT!!! It's not FAIR!!! They get mad at each other for things I have nothing to do with and they make me take sides, help get revenge on each other, and bad mouth each other to other people. It SUCKS!!!

While I deeply love both of my parents, despite their flaws, and have a very close relationship with my Mother, my relationship with my dad hasn't been good since I was twelve. We've been very distant and we both hate that. We try to work on it, but every time we seem to be getting closer, something happens and our relationship goes straight to hell again.

So over the past six or seven months, my parents have been working on remodeling their house. The first thing they did was remodel the bathroom my sister and I used to share. They took out that bathtub that used to be in it and put in a shower in it's place. I use that shower when I can because it's by far the nicest and one of the most spacious showers I've ever used.

Two weeks ago tomorrow, I was using that shower and when I opened one of the two glass sliding doors, said door fell and shattered. It apparently wasn't put on right. Both of my hands were badly cut up. I had a cut in my finger on my right hand that went all the way down to the bone and the glass took two big chunks of skin out of my left hand that required stitches. I had a cut on my foot and one my left arm that was DIRECTLY OVER all of the veins and arteries in that arm that can kill you if you cut them open. The whole thing scared me to death. I was very sore for over a week and although I've been feeling better and healing fast, I temporarily lost some of the feeling in the finger that was cut all the way down to the bone and I fear I might be anemic from the blood loss. That probably sounds a little dramatic, but I lost a lot of blood, more than you'd think, and I was also on my menstrual cycle at the time. I've been having symptoms of anemia since then.

I was afraid my dad was going to be angry about what happened. I was scared he was gonna scold me and make me buy a new door. I was a little scared that he would even ban me from his and my mom's house. Instead, he was nothing but worried and sympathetic towards me. He wanted to look at my hands and arm, he asked me how bad the whole thing scared me, he gave me a couple very big hugs. He couldn't have cared less about the door. It was the closest I'd felt to him in a long time. It was one of the rare moments when my dad shows me how much I mean to him and it meant a lot to me.

We've been tight since then, but tonight, my mom almost screwed the all of that up. You see, on Saturday, I wanted to take my kids to see the new Beauty and the Beast movie and my mom said that she'd like to come. I found out that she told a lie to keep my dad from knowing where we were going out of fear that he'd come along if he knew. My dad has since found out where we went and that we'd left him out of something he'd have probably enjoyed and I feel bad about that. I didn't know my mom was going to lie to him like that. I should've invited him myself, but I didn't realize how much he'd have wanted to come. I didn't think he'd like the movie. Even as an adult, I loved it, but it is still a kids' movie and a musical, so I assumed my dad wouldn't want to come, but apparently he would and now I feel like sh!t.

That incident with the shower door happened two weeks ago and today was the third time that my dad had promised to go to the closest home depot an hour away and get a new shower door. He didn't do so and my mom wanted me to confront him and be a b!tch to him thinking that he'd get it done faster if I did. Thing is, my dad and I have been getting along great lately and after the whole thing with the movie, I was scared that he already wasn't happy with me. If I went and was an @as hole to him about the shower door, then he might explode on me and our whole relationship would go south again. Especially since I was the one who broke the door.

I went to politely ask him about the door, but when he was really sweet to me and we talked for a minute, leading me to realize that he wasn't angry with me, I lost my nerve to say anything that could anger him. My mom kept pushing me though so eventually I mentioned it to him, but it didn't help much. He was perfectly sweet about it, but didn't sound like he had gone to indeed home depot and I failed to light a fire under him like my mom wanted me to. This is not a good example of one of my parents putting me in the middle of an argument, but it's what prompted me to come here.

My mom is furious with me for not standing up to my dad and telling him off about the door like she wanted me to. She brought up the times I have stood up to my dad when it was for myself and accused me of not caring enough to do it for her. I explained to her that the rare times I've had the backbone to stand up to my dad, it was because he provoked me to do so, but he didn't provoke me today. I also explained that even if I had more of a backbone, my dad didn't deserve to be berated for the door today. Yes, he should've gotten it like he promised my mom, but he had a pretty busy day and I don't understand why it's such a big deal anyway. There's another shower and a bathtub in the house. My mom does like to use the new shower, but not often it's not like it's the only place in the house to bathe.

This is what I'm sick of. My choices tonight were to either be a jerk to my dad and ruin how well we've been getting along lately or to not be a jerk to my dad and make my mom mad at me. My parents do this to me all the time. They put me in the middle and make it so I can't possibly get out of the situation without making at least one of the mad at me. My mom acknowledges that she puts me in this position. She says flat out that I have to choose between her being mad or my dad being mad at me. I've tried to tell them that I'm not getting in the middle of anything, but that tends to make BOTH of them mad me.

It's really not fair because I have done nothing to get myself in these situations. I didn't cause my parents to have such a disaster of a marriage, I don't cause their arguments, I don't cause myself to be put in the middle of their arguments. I have no options. It's either p!ss my mom off or p!ss my dad off. Their are no other options.

The only other thing I can think of that I could do is to stop being around my parents, but that is not an option. I love both of my parents very much and could never alienate them from my life.

Super sorry this has been such a long writing, but I just wanted you to know everything you might need to know about the situation. Does anyone have any advice?

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