Building a family with someone requires a lot: patience, love, and mutual trust and understanding. If something happens that impacts the family, it can take a while for everyone involved to wrap their heads around it.
One woman recently shared on Reddit that her husband's daughter from a previous relationship entered his life last year. Before that, she had no idea that her husband had another daughter at all. She's adjusting to the relationship that her husband is building with the 19-year-old, but she's worried that it's coming at the expense of the two children they share.
His daughter has been sick lately.
"My husband has a 19 year old daughter that’s in college," she began. "She tested positive on Wednesday afternoon and has been by herself in the dorm since. She is mildly sick. She’s been FaceTiming my husband for hours everyday. We also have two small children (7 and 2 years old). Our 7 year old is a daddy’s boy. His daughter was not in his life prior to last year when she wanted contact with him, he never mentioned having a daughter to me."
He's been talking to his daughter a lot lately.
The poster writes that all the attention his daughter has been needing has been hard on their other children: "On Thursday, my husband was at work and I guess his daughter kept trying to FaceTime him throughout the day, which he said annoyed him. That night, he was FaceTiming her from around 7pm til midnight. He put his phone facing the TV so they could watch movies/tv together, he ate his dinner on the couch separate from the rest of us, he ignored bed time routines and told me I can handle it, while our 7 year old was crying for him."
He even started skipping family events.
"He was sitting on the couch with his phone chatting away to his daughter for hours. On Friday night, our 7 year old had hockey game and he wished him good luck and gave him a hug, but didn’t bother to get dressed and go to the game. He stayed home on FaceTime with his daughter. I took our kids and my mother out to the game. I came back home to find my husband on the couch sleeping and his daughter sleeping on FaceTime."
And her husband keeps flat-out ignoring the other kids.
"Yesterday she FaceTimed him in the morning for a little bit and then again around 4pm. He ate dinner in the living room while watching football and FaceTiming her. He got off FaceTime around 2am last night after making something in the kitchen and being loud on his way upstairs. He again didn’t help out with bed time routines and ignored our oldest when he wanted to play legos or video games with his dad."
So she decided to draw a line.
"Today, my husbands phone kept ringing while he was sleeping and it was his daughter. I told my husband when he woke up that he’s been ignoring our kids lately and he needs to limit how long he talks on the phone with his daughter. I get that she’s sick and lonely but he’s putting our kids on the back burner."
They ended up going back and forth about it.
The discussion continued: "My husband said he feels bad for his daughter and he wants to build a relationship with her. He said our kids see him everyday and all his daughter has is FaceTime calls, she has no friends and nobody else to talk to and she’s going through a lot. I said with you working during the week and the few hours you have during the evening being spent FaceTiming your daughter, you really don’t spend time with our kids that much and yesterday you blew our oldest off for hours to talk to her."
Then her husband just left.
"He got up and said he was done talking about this, his daughter is going through a a lot, she is sick and stuck in her dorm, with nobody to talk too. He said I’m being ridiculous, our oldest can entertain himself and if not, then I should go do something with him. He then said why do I always have to do things with our oldest, why can’t you (I have and he prefers his dad over me). He got dressed and left. He has been gone for hours and isn’t returning my texts or calls."
Predictably, people were really, really invested in the story.
Initially, commenters tried to make sense of the story. Many assumed that the "secret daughter" was really a girlfriend that the man was trying to cover up, but subsequent updates in the since-deleted post from the woman revealed that this wasn't the case.
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