Yelled at my dad and now I regret it
My (32M) father (67M) widowed 1.5 years ago, has a habit of hoarding a dozen menial tasks and saving it for when I come to visit and offloading it all at once.
For context, I live 1 hour away, I do a pretty good job visiting once (sometimes twice) a week for a good half day, I rarely miss a week - I take him out to eat, to shop. My two brothers (25M and 35M) both live with my dad, are fully capable adults. When it comes to major help with dad, I would say the eldest and I are 50/50 split. But I get tasked with multiple simple things that obviously do not specifically require my help and the time adds up. It has become more like a chore for me to visit, it has become an expectation that I come back once a week.
Before anyone mentions that he just wants to spend time with me, he has just retired, has his own car. He has driven to my house with my mom before she died, he has never driven to my house since - FYI his work place is 15 minutes from my house.
Some tasks would be paying his bills on mobile app, going through his mail and text messages to see which are important vs. Spam, taking him to the local hardware store. He’s most recently been waiting for me to take a day off work to take him to the local DMV when my brother works fully remote and can take him.
What set me off today (Saturday) was that I work the rare weekend and he called (at work) asking when I was coming back today and there was mail from the government on Friday. I said to ask my brothers and dad said (35M) wasn’t home at the moment and (25M) is useless, I said well I wasn’t coming back and he can wait for my brother. He began to grill me why I’m not coming back and what I was doing instead. So I yelled back that I’m at work and even if I wasn’t, I’m not obligated to come back. (I’m going to visit tomorrow, and we already made Father’s Day plans for the week after as per his preference).
Well I guess now I’m feeling horrible about what happened, but at the same time I feel justified in not enabling this behaviour.
Posted Jun 14, 2025, 8:50 PM UTC