My (53F) son (26M) told my husband/his father (57M) how he really feels about him. How can I patch my family up, if at all? : r/relationship_advice:

Background:

My (53F) husband (57M) and I have been married for 27 years. We’re Indian and had an arranged marriage. I’ll be honest, my husband and I both agree that past the initial 1-2 years of our marriage, it was just a mutual respect and understanding, not really love. We had a baby, our son (now 26M), to appease our families and that was it. My husband and I grew up in India but moved to the States when our son was four years old so his upbringing was mostly here. We both raised him how we knew best and thought we did our job in raising a respectful and hardworking man.

My son has a very authentic and paradoxical personality. He’s egoistic and arrogant but loving, selfless, and caring at the same time. He’s someone who is passionate about weightlifting and martial arts but enjoys philosophy, photography, and poetry. He paid his own way through school through a combination of the two jobs he worked in high school, merit scholarships, and internship salaries. He got a very well-paying job right after graduating and has already received two promotions early in his career and has been able to purchase a very nice home and install a pool and home gym, as well as sending my husband and I some money every month. He got married four months ago to his girlfriend of two years. She is also currently ten weeks pregnant and I have a great relationship with her. My husband and I are very proud of our son for who he has become.

Incident:

My husband and I live in a different state and flew out to visit our son and daughter-in-law over the weekend. I thought it was great and I was all smiles (and a few tears) when we left on Sunday night but my husband looked devastated. It took me three days to press him about it and he finally opened up today about what happened during our visit. On Saturday night, my husband woke up in the middle of the night and randomly looked out the window and saw our son and DIL kissing in the pool and drinking something out of wine glasses. My husband confronted our son on Sunday morning for two reasons, drinking during pregnancy (turns out it was just sparkling juice) and making out in the pool. We’re from a really conservative culture and doing any physical affection in public/around parents is a no-no and my husband felt the need to question our son about this and it led to an argument between the two of them where my husband said something along the lines of “I couldn’t even think of doing that around your grandparents, I thought I raised you differently, Didn’t I teach you anything?” My son blew up at this and let all his feelings out in about a 10 minute vent. I summarized our son’s points below.

Our son said the only thing he learned was what not to do as a husband and father and said he would rather kill himself than be anything like my husband.

My husband did often physically discipline him between the ages of 7 and 17. Our son said that he has no happy memories with him and when someone asks him about his father, all that comes to mind was getting beat in the living room, getting beat in his room, getting beat in the basement. He highlighted two incidents that we barely remember where when he was seven years old, my husband picked him up by his ears for lying about something trivial and when he was in his freshman year of high school, when my husband beat him right when he woke up before school since he stayed up extra late working on a passion project the night before (our son remembers the exact date that this happened). Our son told my husband that when someone does that to you, you make it your goal to not be like that and he was happy and proud to not have learned anything from him.

Our son said that my husband was someone who was scared of everything, discouraged everything he wanted, and a hypocrite. He brought up examples like when our son was beginning to have opportunities to play his sport at the college level, my husband’s reaction was to tell him that sports would affect his academics and then when he eventually did leave the team after two and a half years in college by his own choice, my husband gave him shit for it. When our son confided in my husband that he got into a fight at school, my husband’s first reaction was to ask if we should go to the police and tell me. Our son (22 at the time) brought up that when he wanted to visit a religious pilgrimage site alone in a different country, my husband’s first reaction was just to shut his idea down completely under the pretense of “not being safe”. When our son was in his sophomore year of high school, he was selected to travel to Australia for an academic competition that would have costed us around $6000 total and we were fully prepared to pay for it all but when he questioned why we weren’t willing to spend that money on long-term athletic training or even a new cellphone for him despite him asking for the past year, my husband kicked him out of the house for being “ungrateful”. My husband and I wanted his English to be as good as possible and so, we rarely spoke to him in our native language but as he grew up, he wanted to learn the language by himself and my husband always heavily discouraged this. My son asked my husband what kind of father doesn’t pass along his own mother tongue to his child and discourages this. When our son started an online business as a senior year college student, my husband was again very against it because he didn’t like the idea. Small edit: our son did end up playing his sport in college for three seasons, he did buy a new cellphone with the money he made working as a tutor in high school, he did go on the religious pilgrimage himself, he learned our native language by himself and is now completely fluent, he did run the online business. Nothing my husband said stopped my son from doing what he wanted to do.

Our son said that anytime he expressed his true thoughts, my husband would simply be there to make sure to disagree and discourage whatever it is he wanted. Our son told my husband that he feels forced to lie and hide the truth about everything in fear of judgment and he feels caged whenever he talks to him. He referred to my husband as the anti-role model.

Our son barely touched on the incident at hand and just told my husband to not bother coming to their place if he has an issue with him loving his wife.

The fact is that every event our son said is factually correct. My husband and I always saw it that he was learning a lesson for the future and my husband just wanted him to go the safe route and not put himself in any kind of harm’s way that could affect his future. I never knew that some of these things bothered our son so much. Truly, I hope that our son’s relationship with his wife is infinitely better than mine and my husband’s so I really don’t care about them kissing in their own pool in their own backyard at night. I’m surprised that my husband did but that is not my concern right now. I care that our son hates his father and the fact that he said he has no happy memories of them breaks my heart for him. Looking back, I definitely could have stepped in when my husband was being the “tough love dad” and things might be better right now if I had. My husband admits that he went overboard on several occasions and is telling me that he regrets many things he did as a father and would do anything for a do-over. For now, I’m planning on ensuring that there is zero contact between my husband and son but I don’t know the plan for the future. How can I help patch things up between my son and husband, even a little? I know this can never go back to 100% but I’ll do anything for them to even be friendly.

Written on September 3, 2024