u/HarmoniusX

My parents divorced when I was 12 and my dad remarried about four years later. His wife, I'll call her Karen, has always been perfectly polite to me on the surface but there's been a consistent undercurrent of small things over the years that I've never quite been able to shake. The main one that still matters is what happened at my university graduation. She gave an impromptu speech at the dinner afterwards, unprompted, not asked by anyone, and spent a significant portion of it talking about how hard my dad had worked to put me through school. My mum, who paid for the majority of my tuition and worked extra shifts for three years to do it, was sitting at the same table. My mum said nothing. I said nothing. My dad looked uncomfortable and didn't intervene. I brought it up with him about a year later and he said Karen had just been trying to celebrate me and didn't mean anything by it. Maybe. But I've been quietly cautious about situations involving her and a microphone ever since. His retirement party is in six weeks, around sixty people, fairly formal dinner. He mentioned last week that Karen is planning to give a speech and he seemed genuinley excited about it. I said I was glad he was looking forward to it but asked if there was any way the speech could happen without specific references to family finances or anyone's individual contributions given what happened at graduation. He got defensive immedietly and said I was bringing up ancient history and making his party about me. I told him I wasn't trying to cause problems, I just wanted to flag it in advance rather than be caught off guard again. He hasn't responded to my last message and my stepmum has since texted me to say I should aplogize for upsetting him. I genuinely don't think I said anything unreasonable but now I'm second guessing the whole thing.