The reality of life is that it can turn on its head, leaving you feeling battered and scarred from the unpredictability of it all. Losing a loved one is hard. You rarely ever see it coming, and if you do, it doesn’t really change anything. Dealing with grief and loss at a young age primes a person in a way; They no longer see things the way they once did, and use that grief to think critically about the world around them.

Any parent who expects their children to ‘move on’ from a loved one, whether they admit it that they want them to or not, is in over their head. A child shouldn’t have to repress memories of their loved one to spare the feelings of who they deem a ‘replacement’ for said loved one. It’s unethical and immoral at best.

In this next story, a teen’s mother tries to help her honor her late father in any way she can. However, since she remarried, she expects her daughter to look at her second husband as a father. In a utopic world, they would all hold hands and go on a Carnival Cruise together. However, we live in a complicated world riddled with nuance, so the teen doesn’t feel right viewing her stepdad as a father figure. Makes sense to me. Scroll below to read the full story.