TW: child abuse, talk about guns and violence/domestic violence.

This happened a few months ago and I feel like this situation is just utterly ridiculous. But father is a ridiculous man, so I’m not particularly surprised, but the situation gets even more ridiculous than just what’s in the title.

For a backstory, my mom, brother and I spent 10 years in and out of family court trying to get my father’s custody rights taken away altogether so that we didn’t have to go to his house on the weekends to get abused. Abuse that he swears up and down didn’t happen.

There was an order of protection against him where he could not come to my mom’s house, his parents would pick us up and drop us off every weekend for his visitation time. There was one time when I was 5 where he came to my mom’s house trying to break down the front door to hurt my mom and kidnap me and my brother. I remember my mom leaning against the door, crying, trying to prevent the door from giving way while she told me and my brother to hide behind the couch.

Things came to head when he came to our house on my 10th birthday and held (what we later learned was a flare gun, but you couldn’t tell that from where we were) and he basically held my mom hostage with it pressed to her head while my brother and I were in the house on the phone with 911. It took a couple of hours for the police to get him to let her go (this was in the mid 80’s so they didn’t really have the technology or resources that they do now). Then he went to prison for a few years.

My dumb ass decided to try to meet this man when I became an adult. I tried to be the better person and see if he changed at all. Noooope. Not even a little bit. I could go on for ages about all his ridiculousness but this one is just the absolute most ridiculous event that’s happened somewhat recently and me, my mom and stepdad were talking about it and I wanted to get other people’s opinions on it.

At the time that this occurred, I had had the same phone number for 9 years. You know who never once called me, just to see how I was doing? Him. I always had to be the one to call him and when I did call him, it would be one long monologue of all the new things he’s dying from and how much he’s “suffering”.

Skip this next paragraph if you’re sensitive to talk about self exiting. About five years ago, on Christmas Eve, at about 2 in the morning, my stepmom drove as fast as possible off a dock and into a lake. By some miracle, there was a car behind her that saw it happened, and this absolute hero dove into this almost frozen lake to save her while his wife called 911. It was even in the local news.

You know what my complete dipshit of a father days when finding out about this? “Goddammit! I just put $1,000 into fixing that car!”

Sorry for the digression, I just want y’all to get a good feel for the level of assholery we’re dealing with here.

So last year, on my birthday, he puts up a post on facebook that says “Today’s my daughter’s birthday and she couldn’t even be bothered to call me!” Then! Thennnn!!!! This is the best part! He sends me a fucking link to the post in Facebook Messenger. The same exact fucking place where he could have just written me a simple “happy birthday” message!!!

Am I crazy here??? AITA for not calling my father on my birthday? Is something that people do that I’ve just been completely oblivious to for 40 something years now???

Edit: I should’ve made it clearer, I’m definitely NC with him now. A couple of months ago, everything in my life went absolutely to shit and there was a very real possibility that me, my mom and my cat could’ve been homeless and I literally begged him to help me and he didn’t. He said he would, multiple times, over the span of 5 weeks and eventually he just straight up ignored me again.

I have been a financially stable, self-sufficient adult since I became an emancipated minor at 16, asking him for help was literally my last resort and he showed his true colors so yeah, he’s dead to me now. Complete NC from here until he dies