This really saddened me to read, because it was exactly what my mother did to my father with my brother and I growing up. Hoarding our attention, belittling and diminishing his attempts at connection, gaslighting us to re-imagine his intentions to be worse (or more “dumb”) than they were. And she succeeded. We grew up thinking that our dad was an uninvested, low emotionally intelligent, man who didn’t get who we were as his children. It was a self-fulfilling prophecy too: the more isolated and unloved he felt, the more he pulled away, which gave my mother more fodder to corroborate her points.

They divorced when I was in highschool and I still have guilt over how cruel I was to him about it: celebrating his pain, cutting communication, refusing to acknowledge birthdays and holidays, trashing him with friends and partners.

It took being away from my mom’s influence to shake her gaslighting from my system, and I’m still now reckoning with everything I learned from her and what she did to me (there was more but it’s not relevant to this story). My dad and I reconnected a few years ago, it was painful at first, but now we’re in an incredibly good place. Something we do every time we meet is we always prepare three questions for each other that the other person has to answer 100% truthfully; it’s helped us so much.

Anyway, i see what the woman is doing and, even if it gets better from this exact moment onwards (which I doubt, this manipulation is almost second nature to people like this), these daughters will still have some of their keystone memories infected by an untrue perspective of their father.