AITA for finally putting distance between myself and my dad and his girlfriend after years of drama?
AITA for finally putting distance between myself and my dad and his girlfriend after years of drama? Throwaway, fake names, obviously. I'm 16, four days from 17, about to start senior year. Names: Bill (dad), Sandra (mom), Julie (dad's affair partner/first girlfriend), Teresa (current girlfriend). This is long because none of it makes sense out of order. Going into 8th grade I found out my dad was cheating on my mom with a woman he'd known since high school. I sat on it for a month — 13 years old, holding that by myself — then told him. His response was to tell me that if I told my mom, I'd be the one blowing up the family. Not "I'm sorry you're in this position." Not "that's not on you." Just a warning shot. My parents divorced not long after. He never told my mom the actual reason. He framed it as a mutual decision instead of admitting the affair, and to this day she still doesn't have the full story. My mom has fairly advanced MS — physical and cognitive effects both. Not bringing that up to score points off her; it's just relevant context. My dad knew about the diagnosis before they married and before they had kids. Whatever difficulty came with being a long-term caregiver, he signed up for that going in. I can follow the logic of someone feeling trapped or exhausted in that situation. I can't follow the logic of cheating, lying about why the marriage ended, and putting a 13-year-old in the position of covering for him. Those aren't the same thing, and I don't buy the conflation. After the divorce,e my mom moved to Arizona to live with her mother. It happened fast enough that there wasn't a real goodbye — she was just gone one day, and I was left with my dad. Then Julie moved in with her kid. That relationship was a mess from the start: she went after getting me expelled at one point, threatened to sue me over messages I'd seen between her and my dad when the affair first came out, and it eventually escalated to a restraining order before she left. In the middle of all that, my dog died,d and my dad gave my cat back to the shelter after seven years. I wasn't a saint through any of this either — got caught drinking, smoking, doing dumb teenage stuff, and I'm not going to pretend otherwise. But it was happening on top of, not instead of, everything else falling apart. After Jul, i.e., there were a few flings, then Teresa, met on Tinder. Different flavor of difficult. Two grown daughters, very religious, very convinced of her own correctness. Her attitude toward me isn't dramatic — no yelling, no big scenes — it's a steady low hum of sighs, looks, tone, little comments. Constant, low-grade, and deniable, so when I push back on it, I'm the one being "too sensitive." I've raised it with my dad directly. He either doesn't see it or won't engage with it, and in practice he defaults to her side every time. She also redid the entire house — not a few new throw pillows, the whole thing: furniture, layout, décor, routines. The place I grew up in doesn't exist anymore, and there was no conversation about it, no "we're doing this, here's the plan" — she just moved in, and it happened. Consistent with how my dad operates generally: decisions get made, I find out after, and I'm expected to adjust on the spot. Case in point — one spring break he shipped me off to my Oma's so he could have time with Julie, then showed up to pick me up with Julie in the car, no warning, after everything that had already gone down with her. That's the pattern: this is happening, deal with it. Now it's Teresa's turn to run that play. She wants the authority that comes with being an adult in the house — wants her opinions treated as final, wants deference — without putting in whatever it is that actually earns that. And the double standard with my dad is blatant: I'm told constantly that I'm basically an adult, that I need to grow up, take responsibility, act mature — but that framing only shows up when it's convenient for them. It doesn't extend to privacy. He goes through my room, takes things without asking, makes calls about my life without asking my opinion first. Teresa can needle me, and if I say I don't like it, that's me being disrespectful. Adult enough to be blamed, not adult enough to be consulted. On top of that,t I've basically become the house's mood barometer — if Bill's off, I clock it instantly and start running the mental checklist of what I did. I've told him directly that the tension is exhausting, that I stay in my room specifically to avoid friction, that I don't want to be fighting constantly. Nothing changes. This has also turned into actual anxiety, not just being in a mood — bad enough that I've thrown up before presentations from the public speaking anxiety alone. Weighted GPA's around 3.88, which isn't failing by any measure, but it's dipped some under the weight of everything else, and my dad treats that dip as evidence I'm not trying rather than as a symptom of what's actually going on. Today: I went to the store for them, came back, Teresa's looking for a bowl, I mention there was one in my room, turns out Bill had already gone in and taken it without saying anything — same privacy pattern as always. That turned into a 20-minute lecture that started at dishes and expanded to cover chores, grades, attitude, gratitude, general trajectory. Some of it's fair — I could help more, could be more organized, could do better in school, no argument there. But it stops being about a specific incident and turns into a referendum on my character every time. At one point I asked why I get side-eyed by everyone in the house,se and Teresa said I'm always playing the victim. I said something like,ike "How am I possibly getting this much wrong?" — not a performance, just genuinely asking — and Bill's response was to ask me to draft a concrete improvement plan on the spot. I went upstairs, then left the house. So: AITA for pulling back from my dad and Teresa, staying in my room to avoid them, and walking out mid-argument today?
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