Ok, this requires some background:
I'm gay. I got caught by a coach while kissing another boy in the locker room at school when I was 15, and it was a private, somewhat religious school, so they notified our parents. My very conservative parents were furious and disgusted, and I ended up spending about half that upcoming summer at anti-gay conversion-type camp. Needless to say, it didn't work, and I came out when I was 18 and left for college. My parents disowned me, and we never spoke again. I thought that was that.
I went through undergrad and then got my doctorate. Moved back to my home city in 2015, and secured myself a tenure track (now tenured) position at a fantastic research university. I developed a crush on a man I kept seeing on campus, who I eventually realized was also a professor. I asked him out to coffee and midnight breakfast after running into him leaving campus late one night, and we ended up having a great time. We've been happily together for four years now, and we both proposed this past fall. His family are wonderful and things have been amazing up until this past month.
See, my parents divorced a year before I left for college, and I knew my father remarried, but I never actually met his new wife or heard anything about him thereafter. Apparently, he and his new wife moved to the suburbs and had three daughters who are now 11, 9, and 7, which I only know now because the two of them got into a car wreck early this month and both passed. My father's will, which was evidently overdue for an update, left his estate and assets to me, since I was his only child last time it was changed.
It's been a whirlwind week of talking to lawyers and state officials and reading and signing papers, but we're the closest living relatives and deemed the most fit for caring for the kids, so my fiancé and I are going to be taking legal guardianship of them and they'll be coming to live with us in about a week. We luckily already own a 4 bedroom in the city, since we were planning on having kids anyway, so we've got the space. Our university assists faculty kids with private school tuition or public school placement, so we know we can give them a proper education and with our jobs, we're considered upper- to upper-middle class in our city, so we can support them. But we've talked about this a lot, and we're both overwhelmed and we have no clue how to parent these kids. We've read all the pamphlets and watched all the videos the kids' case worker have sent us. But parenting tweens is something we thought we'd have years to prepare for, and we've got a week. Not to mention that their parents just died, and they're probably traumatized and about to move to a brand new city and start a brand new school. This is hectic and terrifying for us, but I know it's scarier for them. How do we bond with, comfort, and parent these kids? Where do we even start?
We've met the kids once at their case worker's office. The oldest and youngest were both very outgoing and very friendly, especially for kids who've just lost their parents, but the 9 year old doesn't seem to want to open up at all, which I suppose is understandable all things considered. She looked at us both, but didn't talk at all when we met and just put headphones on and immersed herself in her phone. Both her sisters said she's just shy, but I worry that we'll fall short trying to parent and comfort her in particular. I'm concerned that we're too unprepared, and won't be able to be the parents these girls need. How do we set aside our own overwhelmed and terrified feelings and focus on being good fathers?
TL;DR I'm gay and my parents disowned me when I was 18. My father remarried and had 3 daughters (11F, 9F, and 7F). He and his wife died earlier this month, leaving my fiancé (30M) and I (31M) with three kids to raise. We're both professors at a big research university in a large city, and our living situation is right for parenting, but we have no idea what we're doing or how to parent three girls who just lost their parents and are about to move to a new city with new relatives who are probably just as overwhelmed and scared as we are.
Submitted January 27, 2019 at 03:34PM by disposableexpendable http://bit.ly/2FPb3tr
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