AITAH for going no-contact with parents

I (25M) am struggling with the relationship dynamic with my (43F) and (48M) parents. This post will be lengthy because there is a lot of history/context needed to set the scene.

To start, I had a great childhood. I love my parents deeply and didn’t really see/notice any issues growing up. When I turned 18 and graduated high school, I left for the military. I did a 5 year active duty contract and moved around quite a bit as well as multiple surges/overseas deployment. At the time, I was married to my high-school sweetheart and we had a child together. She ended up staying in our home state with our child because I was gone so often.

Anyways, my ex-wife and I got a divorce when I got back from my first deployment overseas because I found out she had an affair with her boss. She is not the main premise of this story but she is a part of it. We have a good co-parenting relationship and she is a wonderful mother despite the ugly fallout between us. My parents essentially raised our son for the first year to year and a half of his life. My ex-wife had her struggles being a new mom while her husband (me) was far away in the service. After the divorce happened, I found out that she had been telling people that i was physically abusive, a bad father, and other accusations that could have ruined my life. Being so far away, I didn’t have a way to change the narrative or really defend myself. My parents knew about these things and shared their own struggles with retaining access to seeing our son while I was still gone.

However, here’s where things get messy. Fast forward to when I get out, and my son is 3 and a half years old. My current partner and I moved home from the military a couple years ago and my son is now 6. We have 50/50 custody and are planning to expand our family. My current partner (26F) and I have struggled with my parents since we’ve moved home. There are 3 core issues that I’ve tried explaining to my parents (specifically my mom) as to why I haven’t been speaking to them.

1. My mom’s dynamic with my ex-wife. My mom has, even after watching what I went through with her, maintained what I believe to be an unhealthy relationship. She claims that she isn’t, but what I observe seems to be the opposite. The texts, phone calls, having conversations about our own dynamic with her, circumventing me to see our son through my ex-wife, etc. I have explained to her that I would love for her to be civil and friendly with my ex-wife, but it’s almost like she treats her as her own daughter even after my mom witnessed the infidelity and accusations against me that could have ruined my life/reputation. For my mom to say that she can’t believe the things she did/said, and then for me to come home after being gone and witnessing this type of relationship, feels like betrayal. I have also never withheld our son from my parents and have reached out more than once with sports schedules and attempting for them to see him, but she believes it is toxic and is playing “baby sitter” for them to see my son and not have a good standing with me at the same time. I told her it’s not mutually exclusive and that we can have disagreements while they spend time with my son. I have been through psychotherapy, CBT-I, CPT, and various medications throughout my time being integrated back into civilian life to process what happened to me personally through the affair/accusations and being away from my son for those years (absent father guilt), as well as other things that happened during my service that are not related. I have learned to express my feelings and confront things within myself head-on, but my parents believe that I/my generation are too “in touch with our feelings/feel too much” and they have researched why children go no-contact with their parents. They don’t understand why I haven’t spoken to them because I haven’t been beaten or hit our child or anything.

2. It feels like my mom won’t accept my current wife into the family. I could go on and on about this, but my mom makes it abundantly clear through body language, tone, comments, cold shoulders that she does not like my wife. For example, during a soccer game she took a selfie of us sitting in the bleachers and purposely left my wife out of it and wouldn’t speak to my wife. My mom has made comments about my wife in front of me that are condescending and I don’t know how to respond. Like comments about her being a step mom to my son and how she needs to know her place. My wife has seen what has happened throughout the years and has helped me confront these things. She has seen the worst parts of me, and these things are hard to explain to my parents and the magnitude of these issues. My parents believe that she plays a huge part in my reasoning for not speaking to them. My parents brought up that they had issues with my dad’s parents and it cause them not to speak to them for years. My mom and dad said that my mom was a big part of that and my dad had to finally have a conversation with my mom and that my mom was “bad/hotheaded”. My dad has said that his parents, his dad specifically, still make comments/do things that piss them off but life is too short so they just bite their tongue. They said that my dad’s dad had actually smacked me on my head one time and had made comments around me about my parents financial situation around me when I was a child that warranted them not speaking to my dad’s parents, among other things. I told my parents that I don’t agree with just biting your tongue and stomaching it. Why does it have to be like that? Why are you obligated to maintain a relationship when you are being disrespected, unheard, and “stepped on”?

3. Finally, I had a conversation with my dad in the front yard of their house one day. I opened up about a lot of things that had happened for the first time to him. The conversation was heavy and included a lot of things about my personal/professional dilemmas. I tried connecting with him and I know he has always had a rocky relationship with his dad so I thought this would be nice. A week later, I call my parents to have a conversation with them about boundaries, and he told me to “get over it” and I said “fuck it” and hung up the phone. This resulted in me finally going no-contact with my parents. It felt like a slap in the face when a week prior I had opened up to him about things in my life.

I know this is all over the place, and I wish I had a video camera/voice recording from over the years that I could show. I had a conversation with my parents recently to try and start moving forward. I miss my parents and I love them, truly. The conversation wasn’t the greatest. My mom did a lot of guilt tripping, saying that “she gave birth to me”, “I’m her child”, “she raised me better”, “this is embarrassing and I don’t know what to tell people”, “we’ve had to grieve a son that hasn’t died”, and that she doesn’t want to have a conversation with my wife and I because she is pissed and doesn’t know how to feel around my wife.

I’m lost. I need advice and how to move forward. I don’t need buttered up or anything, but I need help. What do I do? There is so much more and I could spend hours typing but that’s kind of a summary. It’s hard to remember things throughout time that have happened. I’m not saying I’m perfect by any stretch, but my mom specifically won’t take any accountability and she said she doesn’t feel the need to apologize for anything. It stings, and I feel like my dad also inherently defends my mom, which is fair. She said she won’t win because she isn’t my wife but she’s not in a competition. Does she even hear what I’m saying? Does she think this is some daughter-in-law drama? Help.