Dad Grounds Daughter For 2 Years After She Ruins His Engagement, Gets A Reality Check

Getting remarried while having kids is often a complicated ordeal, as one has to balance the needs of the burgeoning relationship with the needs and wants of the kids. Pulling it off seems like no small miracle.

A dad turned to the internet for advice after his teenage daughter destroyed her stepmom’s wedding dress in a successful attempt to get the entire thing called off. He settled on grounding her for an eye-wateringly long two years, until she turned eighteen. Netizens were divided on the entire story.

Image source: ThrowraSadLonely

Imagre credits: Karolina Grabowska / pexels (not the actual photo)

This is the sort of mess that one wouldn’t want to touch with a seven meter (22.9 foot) poll. The horrible passing of the wife and mother, the rapid move to a new woman, the overlooking of the daughters' needs all culminating in this fiasco seems like a story that is just too much to handle. So it’s important to work through item by item.

First and foremost, the husband and father it seems really has moved on from his first wife. On the face of it, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, grief is a hard thing to overcome, so working through it is important. However, he didn’t seem to understand that his process was quite a bit different from his daughters. Some folks can move on easily, some never get over that one relationship. This is all to say, the father perhaps needed some therapy first before charging into the dating market.

Instead, he seems to have decided that he needs a new wife and his daughter needs a new mom before anyone, including the new wife, is really ready for the reality of the situation.

As a teen, losing a parent is simply never easy. The fact that she was in a vegetative state is even worse, as it most likely didn’t even give her a true feeling of closure. At the same time, she sees her father move on and spend his attention on another woman. While we don’t exactly know, it does seem like she has had to carry her grief alone.

This is not to say that destroying the dress is good or acceptable behavior, but once you put yourself in her shoes, it’s hard not to be somewhat sympathetic. The father himself, without thinking, tells her his new relationship is the one good thing he has left. This is not something you can just communicate to your grieving teenage daughter and expect her to be ok.

Not only has she lost her mother, it would appear that her father has forgotten about her as well. After all, “Chloe” is living, breathing proof that her mother is gone and that her father wants to just leave her behind. Some step parents and new partners are downright horrible, but even if they are normal, it’s still a difficult adjustment.

While we only have the father’s side of the story, “Chloe’s” reaction is actually quite telling. Committing to a marriage isn’t something most people look at lightly, so getting out of it this far into the process means she saw something she didn’t like. Beyond the troubled relationship with the daughter, she also indicates some red flags which the man never even mentions.

On top of that, the punishment he has decided on isn’t exactly life-ruining, but it’s downright horrible. Not only is he cutting her off from her social life, he seems ok ruining her chances at college. He blames her for ending his relationship, but it would appear that this was just the last straw, not a one-off event. Hopefully, he took the comments to heart and decided to rethink his life.