Rare sighting in the wild of a woman protecting and valuing a men’s mental health over her own daughter.

My daughter, 19, is going through a tough time. On top of the obvious difficulties of the pandemic, she has been struggling with depression. Her classes are all online so she lives with us.

My husband and I are both working from home so we are very involved with her day to day. We do our best to engage her; family walks, game night, cooking together, but she is still feeling pretty down. She sees a therapist online but I am not privy to how that is going.

In the last couple days she has been displaying a lot of resentment over her childhood. I’m specifically talking about ages 12 to 14. During those years, her father, my husband, was diagnosed with prostate cancer and was going through aggressive chemo.

He has recovered enough to live a normal life. I won’t lie, those were very tough years for our family. My daughter is an only child and was used to our full attention and engagement. It was a hard transition for her to have her father not be able to care for her like he used to and myself having to split my time between her and my husband.

We had a lot of support from our family and we were able to maintain her lifestyle with their help. She didn’t have to quit any teams, she never missed school. I do acknowledge that emotionally there was damage so we did family therapy for a years.

Yesterday she was in a bad mood. During dinner I asked her what was going on and she went into this explosive rant about how many issues she developed due to us. Apparently we are responsible for her grades slipping, her relationships failing, her weight gain, etc.

She tied it all back to her missing crucial development during the years where her father had cancer.

At one point she says something like “Has it ever occurred to you that maybe you should apologize? You basically deprived me of a childhood”

My husband says “I’m sorry honey, I could have done better, and I could have done more for you.”

I shut that down and told her “No, you are not going to guilt your father into apologizing for having cancer. This is unacceptable. You need to accept that life is not fair and there is very little we can do about it. Go to your room and calm yourself down”

She told me to go fuck myself and went to her room.

My husband and I have been arguing about how this was handled. He thinks that an apology is not big deal, and he was hurt by what she said but that “he could take it”. I think that she is looking for someone to blame for her current unhappiness and that we, as her parents, are easy targets. I also know that my husband already feels a great deal of guilt for putting our family through so much turmoil.

I love my daughter and want her to be happy. At the same time, I do believe she is at an age where she needs to take on personal accountability.

Am I the asshole here?

TLDR: Daughter tried to guilt husband into apologizing for having cancer.

EDIT: I am shocked by the amount of comments and cannot read them all. Thanks to everyone who commented and double thanks to those that awarded the post.

I do want to say that, while the concern for my daughters mental health is encouraging, there is a rather harsh dismissal of my husbands mental health here. As a society I think men are expected too much to just suck it up and take it on the chin.

My husband struggles still with his heath, the possibility of cancer returning, and his own depression. I value my daughters mental health, dont get me wrong, but I dont value it above my husbands. I thought what she said was extremely damaging to him and I reacted to that.

I do regret the harshness but not the message.