It’s so wild when 40-something-year-old adults expect their children to pick up their slack for them. If you’ve ever been the victim of a deadbeat parent saying, «The phone works both ways,» I think you should be allowed to flip any table you want and throw a cherry pie in that parent’s face for good measure. So many absent parents put pressure on the kids they never took care of to pick up the pieces of their bad choices and choose to guilt them for not trying hard enough instead of owning up to their very real and harmful mistakes. 

It’s one thing for a parent to want their kids to bond with their half-siblings, but it’s an even wilder thing for the new wife of a deadbeat dad to demand that the children he abandoned bond with her baby that he fathered. It’s stranger than fiction, and yet it happened to one Redditor.