Chip Chick
When this 27-year-old woman was only 8-years-old, her mother sadly passed away. Her brother was 5 when their mother died.
Over the following six years, their father devoted his time to raising them, and he didn’t go out on any dates.
However, when she was 14, their father told them that he felt ready to start dating again.
“He explained to us that it would not replace our mom, but he felt ready to find someone to share his life with again,” she said.
She and her brother felt conflicted about the idea, and they expressed their feelings to him.
Despite feeling uncertain, they also told him that they wanted him to find happiness.
Later, all three of them attended therapy together, and their therapist told their father how she and her brother would have a multitude of conflicting feelings in their grief journeys.
“She said that our love for him would always mean we wanted his happiness, but that our love for our mom would mean we wouldn’t share the same level of joy as him,” she explained.
In response, their father asked their therapist about this, and she told him that the expectations would be for her and her brother to be respectful toward the person their father dated, and it would be wonderful if they liked his potential partner, but other than that, their future relationship with the person their father chose to date was unpredictable.
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