clutches pearls the horror!! 😳

What the fuck were you thinking?!? Oh, right, you weren't.

Your parent - especially if you've only had one - should be the person who believes in you even when you don't believe in yourself. They should be the one person who always has your back.

Instead, you immediately assumed the worst. You had no prior evidence of Kate being a thief, you had no reason to assume she took it, you just went straight to calling your poor daughter some awful things, depriving her of her home and stability in her life, and destroying her room and possessions.

You didn't even ring to check on her. You didn't come to your senses and grovel to your daughter and get some therapy for your serious anger management problem.

When I was a kid and a teenager, my dad had rage fits like that. The tiniest thing could set him off - I left a book on the couch, I walked past without saying "excuse me", and I forgot to replace the toilet roll, are some memorable ones. He never got as far as making me homeless, probably because my mom would have kicked him out if he'd tried, but it was pretty bad.

The consequences are still with me now. I will be forty this year, and while my dad has got much better and we've repaired our relationship, I still cringe if he raises his voice. I still dread having to tell him anything he doesn't want to hear.

That's not all, though. That pattern of submitting to a man in a blind rage to keep myself safe? Of making myself small and trying to hide? The damage that did to me was like blood in the water for other abusive men, and they came after me like sharks. Why not? Half the work of breaking me so I'd tolerate their shit - so I genuinely believed it and thought I deserved it, so I was fucking grateful for it, was already done. All they had to do was finish destroying me.

I've been out of abusive relationships for about fifteen years and married to a lovely, gentle human being for twelve. This shit still fucks me up. My normal meter is broken, I have a ton of trauma and related fuckery, and it all started with my dad treating me as an emotional and verbal punching bag because he couldn't man up and deal with his anger like a proper, functional adult.

I hate the way you said "how do I get my daughter back?" She's not a possession, not an object someone took from you that you have a right to retrieve. The question should be, how do I fix this? How do I make up for my awful behaviour? Not "I want my property back".

And you should already know - if you didn't have the emotional intelligence of a spoon, that is - that the short answer is, you don't.

The longer answer is, you do the work and you fix yourself. Get in therapy, family and individual, sort out your life. Clean up your daughter's room that you trashed and replace anything you broke. Let her come get her stuff - without having to see you if she doesn't want to. Send her aunty money for her keep. When you understand what you did wrong and why, explain it to your daughter and tell her what you're doing to fix it and prevent it from happening again. Own your faults and failures, your behaviour and the consequences, and apologise, sincerely and meaningfully, without expecting anything in return.

Then, she might tolerate some contact with you. I'm not going to sugar coat it, you may never undo all the damage you did. Your only chance is to own this and do everything you can to fix it and make restitution WITHOUT expectation or entitlement. If you do this, but with a mindset of "there, I've paid my dues, now everything can go back to how it was", it's worse than doing nothing - you have no right to expect Kate to accept your apology and forgive you.

You fucked up, bad. Now you get to live with the consequences.

YTA.

NTA, and good job, dad! Way to go standing up for your wife.

The odd occasions when I've gone to see someone with a newborn, it's "how are you? Oh, isn't he/she lovely! Now, do you want me to plate up this meal for you? What needs doing in the house?"

I'm crap at childcare for the very young, but I can colour, build Lego and play "how fast can we tidy up?" with the best of them. And I'm pretty sure I've never arrived empty handed either.

Yup, I'm absolutely hopeless with small ones, but I can bring food and presents, and colour/build Lego with the older kids, like a badass.

Yes, yes we do 😂 that's naughty and you know it.

Yes. I'm severely disabled and I am lucky enough to have a husband who understands that the amount of effort I put in may not be apparent just from the outcome. We work together, so everything gets done and we have some free time each.

Paperwork? My job. Heavy lifting? Hubs. Research? Me. Shopping? Hubs. Financial decisions? Joint effort. It probably comes out about even, over time, but there's times when he's carrying me or I'm taking as much load off him as I can. It's a partnership, we pool resources, and that includes money but also time and energy.

Yup, hubs and I do this and it works perfectly.

There have been times when he earned more, at the moment I think I earn slightly more, but it doesn't matter. We pool the lot, pay the bills, shove some in the savings and split the rest. It's worked perfectly for over a decade. We're a team, there's no need for mine and yours.

It never ceases to amaze me how some men think saying they're 'depressed' means a woman won't know they're avoiding taking responsibility for their actions and, bluntly, sulking like a child.

I've had this before, only I couldn't get the kid off my controller and he slammed my leg and the side of my chair into a glass cabinet in a shop.

Then his stupid, negligent mother started yelling at me.

I admit, I lost my temper and it was not pretty. I screamed at the kid, screamed at the mom, and insisted that the police be called to get her details and the cctv from the shop.

On the plus side, I don't think that kid's ever going to touch someone else's wheelchair again. I scared the crap out of him, and I scared his stupid mom when I told her how much a powerchair costs and insisted on the police and a copy of the shop's accident report. Shop also banned mom + kid permanently, saying they couldn't injure customers and expect everyone to just be fine with that.

I rely on my wheelchair too much and it's too expensive to let some brat damage it or me. There are some things even the stupidest kid should know not to do.

I guard my controller now, and turn my chair off if I can't.

I also get people trying to rest their arses on the arm/controller on crowded buses. I ask nicely once, and then I apply the pointy end of a pencil to their oversized buttocks until they get the fuck off me.

They weren't taking a shot at toddlers or saying they can't have strollers.

The premise was, as we all agree that it is reasonable for parents with toddlers to use a stroller, we can apply that same logic to people using mobility aids that make their life easier and allow them to function better, because the situations are analogous. Not perfectly so, but if you're waiting for perfection I hope you've got nothing planned cos you're going to be there a while.

The entire analogy rests on the understanding that it IS reasonable to use equipment when that helps you do more, easily and safely.

It's not a slap in the face, that's your own prejudices showing. Life is not harder for you because you have a visible disability versus an invisible one, or a physical versus a mental or cognitive or neurological one.

This is bigotry, pure and simple. It's the same need to see yourself as "more than" that led people to see you as a monster in previous times.

I have mental, physical and neurological disabilities. If you want the list, I have Ehlers-Danlos, fibromyalgia, gastroparesis, type 2 diabetes, temporomandibular joint disorder, migraines, anxiety, psychotic depression, PTSD, and autism. My EDS is severe enough that I'm a power wheelchair user.

If I could get rid of one? It wouldn't be the physical ones, tbh. It would be the mental illness because that is far more terrifying and far more difficult to live with, but it gets far LESS understanding.

Not all disabilities are visible, and this kind of hierarchical view with your own disability at the top is prejudiced crap. Nobody needs to play Disability Top Trumps with you to be valid as a disabled person. We all belong in this space, and if you can't relate to post about neurodiversity, then ignore them - no need to put people down like that.

I've met quite a few older disabled people through my work, and I only know one who thinks the way you do about the modern disabled community. He's an awful person - racist, sexist, and just angry, judgemental and nasty to pretty much everyone. He's always got to be the only gay in the village.

Most of them are pretty happy. I talked to one guy who'd been a bit of an activist back in the day and his opinion was that this was what he'd been fighting for - people to be inclusive, work together, lift each other up, and come out into society with our needs and demand equality. So I don't think you can blame this one on your age, just your prejudice. I get the impression that you're one of those people who has to be the corpse at every funeral and the bride at every wedding, tbh. Some people are different, but we all have our struggles and our strength, and we need to respect both. Isn't that what we've been wanting for disabled people this whole time?

That's a pretty cool looking chair! No purple option though ☹️ I have the same with mine - got a Quickie Salsa M2 Mini and while it did have four options (black, white, red, blue) I went for black because the vast majority of it was black anyway, no matter what you picked.

Yup. When I first started my period I was too scared to tell my mom, because she never talked about that stuff. Same when I started having sex, still haven't told her I'm bi (I'm married to a fella, it just seems unnecessary now). She's just... very uncomfortable talking about anything that personal. It's weird, because her sister/my aunt is totally chill about it. No idea what happened there.

Oh no, they were lovely lads, just a bit lacking in knowledge about what being a woman was like! I didn't mind answering the questions, I just was a bit horrified they'd all got to mid-teens without a clue. They all used to look after me - I had really terrible periods at that age and came on while I was hanging out at one of their houses. They promptly organised for one to go to the shop for tampons, chocolate and pain killers, one to find a hot water bottle and the other got me a blanket - it was adorable, tbh!

Mind you, one of them rang me when we all started uni, from across the country, because he was trying to iron a shirt for an interview and the iron wasn't working. I said "have you plugged it in?" and there was a pause, then he swore, thanked me and hung up, lol.

Same age, same issue. Last time I talked to my mom about periods I was fourteen and she was still adamant that using a tampon meant you're not a virgin any more 🙄

Thank you, from the bottom of my heart.

My friends as a teenager were all boys, and I was a girl. I did a LOT of educating once they realised I'd let them in on the Girl Secrets! Everything from "doesn't it hurt if you're bleeding?" to "how the fuck do you get a bra undone without scissors???" to every variation of "is it true that..."

On behalf of future female friends of teenage boys, I thank you.

No, I literally cannot swim because I don't have the energy to do so, and I will dislocated a shoulder and struggle to keep myself from drowning. Just because it's not visible does not mean my limitations are imaginary or I'm choosing not to do things that I could. I am a disabled person, and so are you.

You are literally arguing that I'm choosing to act as though I'm disabled and you don't have a choice.

None of us had much of a choice or we wouldn't be in this situation. Stop denigrating other people's disabilities because you don't understand and can't immediately see them.

Ooh, I'll bear that in mind next time - they don't seem to be as common in the UK, I've always had Quickies and the other one I see mostly is invacare

I hate the fact that there's so few options for powerchairs. Mostly, it's red. Maybe black, and the best I've seen is red, black, white or blue. Why the hell can't I have a purple powerchair? Or a galaxy or watercolour patterned one? Aesthetics still matter to powerchair users!

I am obese. It is a consequence of my disabilities, not the (or even a) cause of them.

Until my EDS became so bad that it severely restricted my physical capabilities, I was a horse rider, a martial artist, and I walked at least three miles on a 'lazy' day, a lot more on a busy one. I was fit, strong, and at a reasonable weight for my height.

Then my knees and shoulders started dislocating regularly, and the pain skyrocketed. Strangely enough, going from full on active life to struggling to walk meant that even though I was deliberately eating much less than I had been, I put on weight anyway.

Then there's the fact that I went from working to surviving on benefits and no longer had the option of hitting multiple shops and going frequently to look for reduced stuff to afford a healthy, balanced diet. Instead, I was stuck with minimal funds and the super expensive, low choice local shop. I could no longer stand and use my hands for long enough to cook everything from scratch, so I was buying stuff that had minimal prep work times.

I'm also on about fifteen medications, and at least ten of those have either weight gain or increased appetite as a common side effect.

All of which also meant I gained weight.

I'm in less dire financial straits these days, but effectively the only exercise I can do is swimming, and I rarely have the energy to get there, change, swim, shower, change, and get home again. I also have a lot of dietary restrictions that are contrary to the majority of 'lose weight' eating advice. So I'm pretty much stuck like this.

But you go on being judgemental and knowing absolutely everything about everyone, I guess.

Such innocent! Cannot possibly be cloaca!

Yup, I was that kid. My mom said she remembered the first time she managed to leave me alone in a room (on a blanket on the floor) without me screaming. She came back in and I'd latched on to the dog and was aggressively cuddling her. Mom says the dog was just looking from me to her like "er... isn't this yours??" 😂

Yeah, this is me. I'm not doing it on purpose, I just don't get it.

I'm absolutely hopeless at office politics because I treat everyone the same, regardless of which clique they're in. I generally don't have any idea which people tend to group together anyway. Seems to get me in trouble a lot.

My supervisor is currently not speaking to me because I told him that having two supervisors issuing me mutually exclusive instructions and both insisting I listen only to them was ridiculous and I expect them to sort out whatever issues they're having between themselves before dragging me into it.

He seems to think this is some kind of punishment; I just think that at least I'm not getting conflicting instructions any more.

Yup, this is me. "What were they wearing?" Well, I think I'd probably have noticed if they were naked, so.. clothes?

Yes! I've literally sat there and felt a blood vessel pop, and I can literally sit there and watch it bruise.

I stumbled sideways at work a couple of weeks ago and bumped into a chair - ended up with a bruise about 6" x 8" on the outside of my thigh, another on my hip, and subluxed SIJs. Also popped shoulder, wrist and fingers out catching myself.

Apparently there's a reason I'm supposed to stay in my wheelchair.

And also, when filling in an accident report, "unprovoked attack by gravity" is not the correct verbiage.

Although interestingly there's a whole category on our accident report form for "walked into stationary object". I kinda feel like there has to be a story behind that one!