'AITA for telling my stepdaughter she can have her late dad pay for the wedding?'

Fighting fire with fire often doesn't end pretty, even if it feels justified in the moment.

"AITA for telling my stepdaughter she can have her late dad pay for the wedding?"

I may have gone too far. My now wife divorced her ex when her three kids were young. He was an add**t. She met me a few years later and we dated for two years before she introduced me to her kids. Two kids really hit it off and Kelly did not like me. Just passive aggressive stuff but it became much worse when her dad passed away.

She did not take it well and resulted in a lot of outbursts, I wasn't living there at this time. She went into therapy but overall didn't seem like it helped. She threatens to run away if I married their mom. So I stayed away but continue to date their mom. Overtime the two other kids started to stay at my place in order to get away from the drama. It was a rough time for them and we bonded even more.

When Kelly was 18 the two of use decided to stop putting our life on hold and get married. Kelly hated this. The other kids were a happy though. Every interaction I have had with her as been unpleasant and I don't not see her as one of my kids. I eventually adopted her siblings when they were 16 and 17. They asked me. During that time she destroy a lot of her siblings stuff for betraying there dad.

Now I rarely see her and I prefer it that way. The two kids have a one and off relationship. I payed for my two kids wedding. I got a call from her asking me to pay for her wedding since I paid for the other two. I told her no. This started an argument about how it's unfair. I had enough and told her to have her dad pay for the wedding.

She hung up after some lovely names I may have gone to far which makes me a jerk.

Edit: She is 27 right now.

Commenters had a lot to say in response.

Pure-Relationship125 wrote:

Yeah it was a stupid, hurtful and immature thing to say, but I get it. I understand this was the oldest girl and probably closest to her father and of course, she probably resented the divorce, but that’s something you should grow out of. once her father died.

You’d think it might’ve opened up her heart a little, but apparently that was not to be. and you know so be it. It’s her life. It’s her choice. But it takes a lot of balls to then come skipping back and wanting you to pay for her wedding!! i don’t blame you for refusing, but I am curious as to what your wife thinks. A tiny Y T A on the comment. A big NTA on not paying for the wedding.

OP responded:

Yeah it was petty. Thinking about it, it was resentment building up for how many time I just took her anger. It was like finally standing up to a b#lly. After so many years of taking it it sure felt great to give it back no matter how petty it was.

Lopsided_Put4682 wrote:

ESH, Kelly obviously took it too far by practically forbidding her mom from moving on and for punishing her siblings for deciding to bond with you, but still, having a d**d parent is something traumatic and you bringing it up just to make a point in an argument is really low.

OP responded:

Fair, that what I thought.

wetcherri wrote:

NTA. She doesn't get to be a cruel brat for years and then pull a surprised pikachu face when someone throws it back at her. Maybe now she will consider the gravity of her behavior.

OP responded:

I am not going to lie it felt so nice to finally throw it back after years of dealing with it.

FacetiousTomato wrote:

ESH. You were in the right to say no. You'd have been in the right to say "because I pay for my kids' weddings."

But taking a swing at her dead dad was a bit too far.

GoldReference_8247 wrote:

If she didn’t want to accept you.. Don’t Pay For Her Wedding!!!!!!! Stick to your guns!!!

OP responded:

I am not even going to her wedding even if she did invite me. I’m good.

CaptainSneakers wrote:

ESH. Yeah, she's an entitled brat to think she can treat you like garbage and then expect you to fund her wedding. However, you sure acted like garbage when you mocked her for having a d**d father. You owe an apology, but not a wedding fund.

Open-Bath-7654 wrote:

I would love to hear Kelly’s side of this story. She sounds traumatized, plus this narrative also sounds like you treated her differently from her siblings. Likely from day one if she was the “difficult kid.” The outcast in her family for struggling with complicated grief over the loss of her unworthy father.

So I feel like we’re not seeing the whole story through your perspective, and I can’t make a judgement about the family dynamics at large because of that. But for the comment itself, yes of course YTA, you know that. I think you meant to be cruel hoping she’ll just stop calling you.

Even_Enthusiasm7223 wrote:

She had a trauma so do you have the two kids? She refused to let it go and blackmailed her mother. When you finally did get married, he destroyed her sibling stuff because they accepted you as a human being and a father figure. She destroyed any kind of happiness she could have had. If she was there.

She left and wanted nothing to do with. He was evil and hateful to not only you but to a mother and or two of the siblings. You paid for your children who you adopted weddings which is your right. She then called you out of the blue wanting nothing from you except to be an ATM.

Because you know if you paid the wedding money, she wouldn't have invited you to the wedding. Well it was harsh. Sometimes payback is annoying. She hated you for replacing a father except for when it came from money. Sometimes people lose their cool and say awful things. NTA, but hurtful.

MadameTrafficJam wrote:

YTA, but not because you said no. Because you weaponized a profound, paradigm shifting loss.

This isn’t about how a kid behaved toward you. She was a KID, even if she came with more issues than you’d liked her to have. And she clearly had a lot going on. You have every right to keep your distance because of it, but let’s not pretend this was pettiness- it was cruelty, and it was meant to be cruel.

I had a lot going on around the same ages and I didn’t handle it well. My mom got very sick very quickly. I was hiding the fact that I was in an ab#sive relationship. And my dad was a functional alc*holic. I acted out, a LOT. I turned to dr#gs myself. I got my act together after a little while, but not everyone does. Not everyone feels like they can.

These types of ACEs cause paradigm shifts that are so fundamental that they can very easily alter the course of a person’s life.

You dated a woman with kids. That doesn’t often mean you ride off into the sunset with your newfound love and the kids become yours as if they always were.

It’s nice when that happens, but even when it does it comes with a LOT of pain. And her behavior does sound like she had her father in her ear blaming her mother, possibly even you, for his add**tion. Logically that makes very little sense, but to a kid? We want to believe our parents would never lie to us so often will accept information that we wouldn’t accept from other sources.

She had issues. Children of divorce and children of addicts often do. And even if a good relationship was never going to happen, you’re still supposed to be the adult in the situation. That doesn’t, to be clear, mean no boundaries. You were right to say no, this is a good opportunity for her to learn that how she treats people will come back to her down the line.

You were not right to cruelly weaponize her dad’s d*ath.

What was your goal there? To cause harm. Not just that…to cause as much harm as you possibly could. That does make you an ass.

Even if you were saintly in all of this, it was beyond cruel. And it says a lot about who you choose to be. I don’t buy the “I was innocent right up until this second” for a single moment, btw- behavior like that doesn’t just make itself known after a decade or so.

I know that people like to portray ourselves as the victim or the hero, never anything between, but you don’t jump from benevolent, innocent savior of the family who was just a poor victim of one member (who happened to be a CHILD, by the way- a grown man portraying himself as a victim of a child?

I’ve seen that before and it’s often in someone who chose himself a scapegoat who didn’t stay where he thought she should), as you are trying to portray yourself to be, to a sociopathic level of cruelty inside of a 5 minute phone call. You just don’t.

I don’t believe you were an innocent who treated this child with kindness and compassion right up until you decided to be the polar opposite of who you portray yourself to be. Your money is yours and you can do whatever you want with it.

You can have boundaries. You can choose not to pay for the wedding of a person that you don’t want to pay for. But the cruelty makes you an AH. And I suspect that you were far crueler to her throughout her life than you are trying to make people believe. Cruelty doesn’t just randomly show up in an otherwise kind person. It just doesn’t.