This is a pretty particular question with a bit of a story, so if you don’t want to read it, don’t respond.

Recently my mother suggested it would be a good idea for me to get back in contact with my father, who I’ve cut out of my life for four years when I turned 18 and he refused to help me with college money on account of (exact words) “He’s McDonald’s material”. My father had been, for the past three years, blowing up our house phone with voicemails about how he desperately wants to talk to me and hear from me again, sometimes accusing my mother of lying to me about him.

Long story short, my parents divorced when I was 13 and since then it was a tug-of-war with my mom and dad over me and my brother’s trust, and this took a huge emotional toll on me during my adolescence, leading me to depression and anger issues. My father back then was very manipulative and had psychotic episodes. I had to call the cops on him a couple times, I ran away from home, and had a suicide attempt, not to mention how many times I would blame my mother for the divorce and get into arguments with her. I have since then entered therapy and gotten better.

Once I got better, I went to college with financial support from my mother for one year and was on my own for the next three years. Now I have but one year left of college and I’m headed for grad school. My father had gotten my brother to talk to me (he’s 16 now) and my brother told me my father had “changed, and he’s a different man now”.

So I met up with him for coffee one night and I felt kind of bad for his situation, he’s poor and clearly has mentally deteriorated. I don’t want to blame anyone anymore because I knew my parent’s marriage wasn’t right to begin with. But I felt really sorry for him. Whats more is that he kept overapologizing to me and spilling his heart out to me and I couldn’t really take it. It’s been four years I’ve been fatherless and even before that he was never a father to me in a real sense. I couldn’t really handle it and have felt sad over the past few days.

Well, that was two weeks ago and since then he blew my cell phone up with text messages trying to keep tabs on me like “what are you doing? what are you thinking? what did you eat today?”. I don’t want to be rude and point out that he’s being intrusive so I respond tactfully once or twice to let him know I’m fine and ask him how his day was. He ignores and after about a week, he blows my phone up with accusations that I’m ignoring him, saying he’s been taking days off for me to see him. I never agreed to hanging out with him more than that one time. I explained to him he can’t expect things to go back to buddy buddy after four years of estrangement, and that I’d more than love to make time for him on my own accord. I told him I’m busy (which I really am, studying, working, organizing fraternity stuff, being with friends, and playing music) but he doesn’t seem to believe me… it seems that if I don’t hang out with him every other day of the week, or if I don’t respond to every persistent question of his that I’m ignoring him or that I don’t love him.

I don’t know for sure yet but it kind of smells manipulative… it puts me in a hard place because from everything that he did to my mother and me when I was younger, I knew him as a disturbed person, and its easy to say for me to deal with it like I’d deal with any crazy person, by shutting them out, but in the four years I’ve been out of contact, his hair has turned gray, he has lost teeth, and has grown frail. It’s truly a sad thing to witness and I don’t know what to do.

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