My dad passed away eight months ago after a relatively short but intense battle against lung cancer. My parents were still married, and they had been together for 30 years. Yesterday, my mom called me to tell me that she’s going to get married to a man who lives in Senegal.
For context, we’re from a European country, and she says she’s known him for a long time. Apparently, they used to know each other years ago when he lived here, and even my dad knew him. I also met him as a child but can barely remember. My mom told me they already used to have feelings for each other back in the day, but didn’t act on it because my mom didn’t want to risk losing her marriage to my dad.
But they haven’t seen each other in person for nineteen years. They reconnected in August, after he messaged her saying he’d heard my dad had passed away. Now, two months later, she says she’s in love and wants to marry him.
She plans to go to Senegal in December for a month, and after that he’s supposed to move into my childhood home, the house my dad worked so hard for, where I grew up, where my parents built their life together. It makes me feel physically sick.
I completely lost it on the phone when she told me. I was in shock. I still am. I told her I needed time to process, and I haven’t seen her since. I can’t sleep, I can barely eat. It feels like my dad just died again, in a different way.
What hurts even more is that my mom doesn’t seem to understand why I’m so devastated. She says she’s making this decision consciously and that she knows it’s fast, but that it’s her life and her choice. She also says she feels like I’m trying to control her, when all I’m doing is trying to express how much this hurts me.
To make it worse, she’s keeping this secret from almost everyone, even her friends who knew this man from years ago. She’s only told me. And I feel completely alone with it.
I can’t support her in this. I can’t attend the wedding if it happens. I can’t even imagine going home and seeing another man in my dad’s place. It’s just too much.
Has anyone else gone through something like this? When a parent moves on too fast, or makes a decision that feels like a betrayal of the person you lost? How do you protect yourself emotionally without cutting them out completely?
TL;DR: My mom is planning to marry a man she hasn’t seen in 19 years, only 8 months after my dad’s death. He lives in Senegal and would move into my childhood home. I (27F) am devastated, can’t understand her decision, and don’t know how to cope or maintain a relationship with her.