Oct 13, 2026, 2:30 PMAs I have been chronicling here for the past week, it seems he's about to just stop being in his daughter's life. She has *very lightly* pushed him away due to his lack of involvement & some incidents of broken trust, & he seems to want to just accept that she doesn't want to talk to him & leave it there.
It's the first time she's testing (as children sometimes do) whether he will persist in loving & caring for her, & he won't even try to clear the hurdle.
Oct 13, 2026, 2:30 PMSo, when the family stops providing the extra level of support we have been giving him because we want to help him be able to be a father to his daughter, he's going to decide that our love was "transactional" & that we never really cared.
I can already feel my family shifting towards just directly giving energy to my 10 year old niece who needs love because her dad is being a flake. It sounds like she's going to be living with her mom full time, so he's not our line of connection anymore.
Oct 13, 2026, 2:36 PMAs far as the daughter thing goes it's like "I don't know what to say, dude. You're choosing not to take your ONE responsibility in life seriously, & that ONE responsibility is a child you CHOSE to have. If you abandon her—a child whom we love—yeah, you might find there actually are conditions for relationships with other adults & in this case one of them is STOP HURTING YOUR CHILD."
Oct 13, 2026, 2:45 PMI told Niece's mom that ideally I would LIKE for my brother to stay in Niece's life, but it's starting to look like the child would be better off without his eighth-hearted effort (HALF-hearted is way too much).
She doesn't need to chase the love of a man who won't show up for her. He's going to keep wounding her over & over.
That's pretty much where Niece's mom is at, even though she has worked hard to not alienate Niece from her dad.
How fucking tragic. How absolutely fucking tragic.
Oct 13, 2026, 2:50 PMHe is going to lose his shit when he finds out that his family does not actually have a tolerance for him ABANDONING his child.
I mean, look at the self-centered logic: he wants HIS family, including his parents, to continuously show up for him, no matter what, but HE can't even TRY to repair anything with his daughter?
If it's about what family should do for each other, then he should hurry up & start acting like family to his daughter.
Oct 13, 2026, 2:55 PMThe reason he is still in our lives now is that we love him to the point that we have been willing to keep trying & we don't like the thought of him suffering.
He needs to get some perspective & realize that is NOT the love he gives to HIS daughter.
Lil Sis says it breaks her heart because our dad is her go-to whenever she needs help. No matter what it is, the first step is "I'll call Dad", but Niece doesn't have a dad who is just there for her like that. Not even close.
Oct 13, 2026, 3:01 PMLil Sis also pointed out that if he needs help being a dad—if he actually wanted someone to help him figure it out—he has both a dad AND an older brother with a ton of experience under their belts.
If he was just lost in the fog of child-rearing, he literally has other men in the family who could tell him some things about kids. But he already knows that the first thing they would tell him is that he needs to invest in her more & take responsibility for developing his relationship with her.
Oct 13, 2026, 3:05 PMGod damn men who have children that they expect women to raise without their effort.
Seriously, they can go to hell.
Lil Sis says that whenever he visits home, he simply leaves our mom & SIL to take care of her & doesn't even seem to recognize that he's handing them work to do. He doesn't think childcare is work when women do it. Only when he does it.
Oct 13, 2026, 3:12 PMThe part that drives me crazy is that, for all the stupid misogynistic bullshit in the stupid church culture around us, our dad was NEVER a half-hearted dad. He'd get home from work & was immediately helping my mom with us kids, which continued until bedtime.
I do not remember a time in our lives where our dad in any way suggested that raising kids was "women's work". Mom was a SAHM, so she was the primary caregiver, but if Dad was present, Dad was being a father.
Oct 13, 2026, 3:15 PMI see Bro1 do the same thing. I have my problems with him but none of them are related to him failing to be an active, caring presence in their lives. I don't think anyone who sees Bro1 & SIL with their kids could get the impression that SIL does all the work.
So like...dude, if you need an example of what it looks like to be there for your kid, you have 2.
But it's wooork.
Why won't women just raise his child for him?
Oct 13, 2026, 4:53 PMIt's hard to process that I've reached this point with him after all these years of refusing to give up on him & always thinking the best of him & giving him every benefit of the doubt anywhere that doubt could exist.
I don't think he's an alcoholic (although I can't know that for sure), but some of his patterns are similar to my ex husband to whom alcoholism was a way of life (if you or someone you are close to have experienced alcoholism, you know what I'm talking about).
Oct 13, 2026, 4:53 PMI was talking to a friend & as he was trying to add "benefit of the doubt" kind of ideas, I had to explain that over his whole life—going back to childhood—I have always come up with every best possible explanation for his behavior.
Unfortunately, no one needs to suggest "maybe it's actually this [slightly more positive interpretation]," because I have BEEN there & DONE that.
Trust me, if it's a more compassionate explanation for his behavior, I already came up with it & leaned on it hard.
Oct 13, 2026, 4:58 PMThat's the thing.
Me being at the end of my rope is a very bad sign for him because it is a very, very long rope.
Even as recently as last month I was making little excuses for him to other people in the family (which is enabler behavior, by the way).
I have always been the one saying "give him time" or "I think he's actually been growing a lot lately".
Please understand, when I write harshly about him, you are reading the words of someone who has only ever tried to think the best of him.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:03 PMAt this point, making excuses for him, whether to myself or to other people, is only enabling his destructive choices.
It may come from a place of compassion & hope, but I've been trying to hold his relationships with our family together this whole time & not letting him reap the consequences of his destructive choices. I'm not the only one, not at all, but I may have been the most energetic.
I have to stop.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:10 PMNot everything you do to be "compassionate" is actually good for someone.
It's really hard to accept, but sometimes you have to let someone blow up their life because otherwise they will always expect other people to bear the consequences of their actions.
He doesn't want to face the consequences. That's why he's always in "crisis". At any moment, a choice he made could come back to bite him. Oh, he must be saved! Oh, how would he ever be able to bear *the consequences of his own actions*?
Oct 13, 2026, 5:14 PMThis just takes me back to enabling my abusive, alcoholic husband. Eventually I had to decide to stop mitigating the damage for him. I had to stop cleaning up his messes & making his excuses.
If you have been in this situation, you KNOW. It's not something that can be fully described in words. You become trapped in someone else's disaster, but you can't stop trying to help them.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:20 PMGod, this hurts.
But please trust me...when I say I am done with his shit, it is NOT because I haven't given him enough chances or that I haven't "looked at it from his perspective."
I have always looked at it from "his perspective". I have entertained fantasy notions about who this person is.
I have done everything I can to help him not fucking lose his relationships. Continuing to do that would be literally *immoral*, as in actively harmful to people (including myself!).
Oct 13, 2026, 5:25 PMIt's not "giving up" on a person, not really.
"Giving up" suggests one should just have more endurance, but sometimes endurance is the problem.
It's not primarily that he's exhausted my patience.
The core of the issue is that he has been allowing other people to pick up the slack in his life, & people (self-included) have been doing the lifting for him. That's a man who never properly deals with the results of his choices.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:31 PMPart of what happens when I try to explain this to others is that I talk about individual issues, but it requires self-examination to get to the root of what's happening, because it's not happening in a vacuum. What's happening here is the definition of enabling.
You don't notice it's happening at first, especially when it's a person who lives far away whom you don't interact with every day. It's not the same intense emotional drain as it is when it's someone in your household, but same thing.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:34 PMIt's time for an anti-intervention.
Consequences are going to hit him with the force of a sledgehammer, but other people need to stop softening the blow. Let them hit him. Let him deal with sorting his own problems out.
"Help" isn't helping, because it's not a bad situation he needs relief from. It's him & his choices haunting him.
Oct 13, 2026, 5:38 PMI don't know how it is that this man & his victim complex have had us doing this for years.
Some of it is that he DID go through traumatic stuff, & all of us have been through traumatic stuff, so we didn't want him to suffer alone.
But then his life became defined by his supposed suffering, & we just kept trying to relieve the suffering, kept trying to treat the symptoms, when at the very bottom of it all is a guy fucking destroying his own life with his own choices.
he sounds awesome.