<p>I’m a frequent poster, but I want to keep this under wraps a bit, so I hope that the administrators will forgive me my pseudonym… Still, I trust the advice given here, and I trust the people here, and I want to know what you all think.</p>
<p>I’m a young adult, out in the real world. I have a good job and a good husband. My mother is mentally ill (major depression with psychosis) and physically disabled (several obscure degenerative diseases), and has been in and out of psychiatric wards since I was in eighth grade. It is difficult to tell what is truth and what is lies when it comes to what she says. My father is a wealthy professional. I have one younger sibling. We were never offered counseling to talk about my mother’s disease, and speaking of her illness within our family was strictly taboo.</p>
<p>Shortly after I graduated from college, my mother moved out for the second time in as many years. My father took up with another woman after telling my sibling and I that our parents’ relationship was over. He didn’t tell my mom, who found out about the relationship from the other woman’s estranged husband, and my mom filed for divorce. Much of the money was swept away into the divorce lawyers’ pockets during the nearly three years of proceedings. The divorce dragged through the middle of my own wedding. My sibling’s and my trust fund was illegally dissolved to pay for their lawyer fees… I’m still wading through that problem, but I have little money of my own for lawyers, and little energy to pursue the money.</p>
<p>It soon became clear that my mother could no longer care for herself. We would find her wandering the streets with dollars fluttering out of her wallet. Her electricity was turned off for non-payment. She was incapable of paying her bills. We would find her apartment strewn with open bottles of prescription narcotics, paint from her arts and crafts everywhere, no food in the house. After a few accidents, I had to convince her to give up her car. I had to convince her to give up her apartment and move into an assisted living facility-- she was fifty-eight, and I was twenty-five. With the help of her divorce lawyers, I had the state declare her to be an incapacitated person, and a guardian was appointed to supervise her care. With the ample alimony that my father pays, along with Medicare and Social Security Disability, she lives in a very nice two-bedroom apartment at the assisted living facility, and I have set up drivers and caretakers for her, to take her to her twice-weekly electroshock therapy treatments that blast my sibling’s birthday, my wedding, our family members, from her damaged brain. She will spend the rest of her life this way, in the isolated and comfortable bubble I have set up for her. My sibling and I are sad, but she is only a shell of the woman that she was when we were growing up, and in many ways we have already grieved her death.</p>
<p>My sibling and I have worked to maintain close relationships with both of our parents, though our father has not helped with any of my mother’s care, aside from providing for her financially. Shortly after the divorce began, my father and the lady he was seeing parted ways and my dad began to relish the life of a well-to-do bachelor. He would constantly go to parties, go out drinking with his friends, see movies, date women. He finally settled down somewhat, and started dating my future stepmother. They had been together for nearly six months when I met her in November. Our meeting was sprung on me-- I had no advance warning, I was not told that he was seeing anyone, my husband and I met her when we were in town to have dinner with my father. (In fact, my father has a long-standing history of not telling us about important milestones in his life… He didn’t tell us that he’d taken up with the woman that broke up our family, didn’t tell us he was buying a new car, didn’t tell us that he was selling the house, didn’t tell us that he was going to be going out of the country with his new girlfriend… he doesn’t tell us anything, and I’ve had difficult conversations with him in the past, using kindness, anger, frustration, humor, EVERYTHING in order to impress upon him how important it is that he keep us in his life if he wants to remain in my sibling’s and my lives. No approach has worked.) </p>
<p>In December, on Christmas Eve, my father called me to gleefully say that he was going to propose. I reacted with anger, telling him that we didn’t even know this woman. She knew every detail of our lives, but we barely knew that she had existed. I didn’t even know her last name, but she had organized my closet. I told my father that two things needed to happen: 1) There needed to be a pre-nup to protect my sibling and I and our eventual children from another costly divorce, and 2) He had to be in charge of telling my mother, because she needed to find out before the wedding and it was not my place to tell her. He agreed on both counts, and I didn’t hear anything about her accepting his marriage proposal, or anything about wedding plans after that.</p>
<p>My mother’s father died a month ago, sending her into another tailspin and landing her in the psychiatric ward yet again, for several weeks. She was as fragile as she ever has been. While I was in town for my grandfather’s funeral, I asked my father whether or not he and my future stepmother had set a timeline for the wedding. He reacts with surprise, as though he had forgotten, and says, “Oh! We’re getting married May 6th. It’s going to be really small.” After I get home, I find out that May 6th is a Wednesday, that a couple of my father and stepmother’s friends are invited, but that we are not. I find out that he has not told my mother about the wedding. I also find out that he has not signed a pre-nup, and that he is suddenly very against signing a pre-nup, because it’s “just not the right thing to do.”</p>
<p>I had a very loud conversation at him shortly after finding all of this out. After much yelling and screaming on both of our parts over the course of two evenings on the phone with one another, the wedding was moved to May 3, a week from today, so that we could all attend. He agreed to sign separate property agreements that would sufficiently protect the wealth that he currently has (not a pre-nup, but as good as I’m going to get). I ask him whether or not he had told my mom yet. After more arguments, he agreed to contact my mother’s therapist and let her know that he was getting married so that the therapist could break the news to my mom. I said that this was fine. He professed that my sibling and I are the most important people in his life, and that we will always be the most important people in his life, and that he would always do everything in his control to help us whenever we needed it.</p>
<p>A few days ago, I spoke with my mother. She did not mention the wedding. I contacted my father and asked him whether he had told my mother’s therapist specifically that she should let my mother know about the wedding, and asked whether or not he had followed up on it. He said that no, he wasn’t going to. He said that in the e-mail, he had given the therapist the information and said that it was up to her to decide what to do with it, and that if I wanted more than that, I would have to do it myself, because he was done. He said that she would find out soon enough, and that he’s “not going to let her control [his] life anymore,” and that I should stop letting her control mine. I said that he was putting me in the middle again, and that it was completely inappropriate to leave her to find out this knowledge AFTER the wedding had taken place, and as he continued to rant, I couldn’t stand it anymore and hung up as he was talking. He immediately tried calling back twice but I didn’t answer. I just could not process everything I was feeling, and I didn’t know how I wanted to proceed with my relationship with my father. I talked with my husband, who insisted upon calling my mother the next day to inform her about the wedding in an appropriate and kind-hearted way, and I went to sleep.</p>
<p>The next morning, I receive a text message from my father. In perhaps the most cowardly act I’ve ever heard of, he has dropped off an unsigned copy of the e-mail he sent to the therapist at with the manager at my mother’s assisted living facility, and left without waiting to see her. His message said that he hoped that was sufficient, because he “[didn’t] know how to do any more than that.”</p>
<p>I call my husband, who immediately calls my mom to try to couch the news. I call my mother’s therapist and leave her an urgent message. I call my mother’s sister to let her know what’s going on. My husband can’t reach my mother, my mother’s therapist calls me back to tell me that she HAD received my father’s original e-mail and HAD told my mother, but that my mother had received electroshock therapy the next day and so she might not remember about the wedding anymore. My husband and I continue to try calling my mom, and finally I get her. I re-break the news to her, and she says that she actually did remember, and that she’s doing okay. I tell her about the woman my dad’s going to marry, and she handles it beautifully. I leave the rest of it to her and her therapist to sort out.</p>
<p>At this point, the wedding is in a week. I am tired by the thought of my father, and have not spoken to him since our conversation on Friday. He’s called periodically, and he left one voicemail for me, in which it was evident that he was irritated, and that he didn’t understand why I was so upset. He continues to try to call, and I continue to not want to answer, because I don’t know what to say. I don’t feel like condoning his tendency to lie by omission anymore. I don’t feel like giving him or his marriage my approval anymore. I don’t feel like giving him the privilege of a continued close relationship with me anymore, since I feel like it’s so unreciprocated… He says he loves us, but he seems to only further his own interests.</p>
<p>At the same time, I have no interest in ruining his wedding. My future stepmother is a nice lady, and I don’t want to ruin her day. I feel that would be inappropriate and incredibly immature. I don’t feel like pretending that everything’s okay is the appropriate way to handle things, either, since that would be lying. I can’t just stay out of the way during the wedding, since there will probably only be about ten people in attendance.</p>
<p>I don’t know what to do. I’m twenty-seven, I work at least fifty hours a week at a demanding job, I’m trying to maintain a marriage and pay off student loans, and I’m drained. I’m sorry that this is so long, but I don’t know what to do in order to both stand my ground and attend the wedding, and I’m desperately in need of some parental advice… I don’t feel like my parents are qualified to give that anymore.</p>
<p>Thanks.</p>