Definition: Given a real-life anecdote of a complex ethical situation, generate a suitable title that describes the main event/root cause of the situation. Imagine that the given text is a social media post, and you have to write the title of the post, so the users can decide to read the main text or not.
Input: Hold tight lads, it's gonna be a wild ride. And probably confusing af. There will be 2 TL;DR - one at the end of the backstory, and one at the end of the actual story. Let me know if you need more info. 

Backstory: my parents (Irish mother, Australian father) split up 20 years ago, and my mam moved back to Ireland with myself and my sister. Mostly because she had nothing tying her to Australia after the split with my father, and by the time they had split up, he wasn't even living with us any more. He was a cheater, emotionally manipulative, borderline physically abusive with myself and my sister because he had some very firm ideas on what discipline should be, didn't believe in celebrating Christmas or birthdays (this sounds like a first world problem, but it matters when you're 8) blamed all his behaviour either on his own mother (which is a different story altogether) or on manic depression, and as much as my mother tried to help him, he wouldn't let her, and she eventually had enough, packing up everything we owned and spending her entire savings on getting us back to Ireland. Where we have been living happily, if not ideally, for the last 20 years. I was 8 when we moved, my sister was 4. 

When we moved, maternal grandparents helped out a lot, but after they passed three years after moving to ireland, I basically became a second parent to my sister. At the time, it seemed better for my sister to have two parental figures, because I was a lot more independent than my sister, even when I was her age. Even so young, I knew that I was OK with having only one parent, but I didn't want that for my sister. So I helped raise her in the only ways a preteen can. And this continued right up until I went travelling last January. 

Across those 20 years, my father is still doing as he does. He was in regular contact with us at first. Phone calls, letters, a little money when he could afford it, since he was never able to hold down a job for very long. Because we were little, we relished every letter and every second of every phone call. As we got a little older, and started asking why we moved in the first place, our mam never lied to us. She told us the truth about how she had been treated. She never exaggerated about it, nor did she try to prevent us from keeping in contact  with him if we wanted to, but she didn't spare us the gory details of why they split, either. If anything, she wanted us to have a relationship with our father regardless of what he had done to her. 

I digress. The contact eventually petered out. We rarely heard from him, but every time he did contact us, he was all about how much he loved us and wanted a good relationship with us, despite doing nothing to prove this. As we got older, we got more and more fed up with his antics. It became a routine for him to cease all contact, then call or send something out of the blue as if no time had passed, we would call him out on this instead of things playing out the way he wanted them to, he'd get into this big pity party of "I'm a piece of shit, you don't love me" without actually doing anything to resolve the problem. He would then cease all contact with us so he could go nurse his bruised ego, rinse and repeat. This kept going straight through our teen years, and is still happening to this day. 

TL;DR: father is a manipulative, abusive person who expects us to bend to his will in order to rebuild/maintain a relationship and gets butthurt when we don't. 

So on to the actual story. At the start of this year, I got a job on a cruise ship. I was informed that I would need either an Australian passport or an Australian maritime visa. A call to the embassy in Dublin told me that I'm not eligible for a visa, because I'm a citizen, and that if I turned up in Australian waters with a visa, they could extradite me back to Ireland because I should have had a passport. But in order to apply for a passport, Australian law states that because I was born after 1986 I needed proof that I am a citizen of Australia. Meaning I needed to have at least one citizen parent, and be able to prove this. So I send my father a message (we're in the stage after sulking but before he's plucked up the courage to talk to us again in the hopes that we've forgotten that he's a screw up) 

To his credit, he simply asks me what I need him to do, and drives from the middle of the arrapiles mountains (where he is living in a van) to a passport office in Melbourne to send official copies of his birth cert and passport to the embassy in Dublin in time for my appointment. This is probably the best thing he's done for me in the last 20 years, and I am extremely grateful for it. I tell him so. Repeatedly. Appointment goes without a hitch, a passport is approved, and before too long, I'm on a ship, which is conveniently making port in Melbourne. 

He wants to meet up for a day, which I'm fine with. We spend the day talking, and he deliberately avoids talking about the way he's treated us for most of our lives. I don't push it. After the meeting he stops talking to me again, despite the distinct lack of argument. I brush it off as normal and continue with my life. I get off the ship, and move to New Zealand. He's chatting on and off over these months, nothing too serious. There's usually at least two or three months before attempts at contact, conversation for an hour or so and drops off again. At this point, my sister hasn't spoken to him in about 5 or 6 years, because she's not as forgiving as I am. She decided years ago that she was tired of the crap, and decided she wanted nothing more to do with him. 

A few weeks before Christmas, my dads sister sends me a message. She wants to pay for me to travel from New Zealand to Melbourne for a visit in December. I agree to this, and she pays for literally EVERYTHING while I'm there. I think the most money I spent while I was over there was on one little ice-cream (a golden gaytime, for the curious :P) 

Before I went over, I told my dad that I was going to be there, and that if he wanted a visit, I would be available for that. He proceeds to dictate how this visit is going to go. I am going to meet him in Melbourne CBD and none of his family was going to be with me. He wanted it to be just me and him for the whole day. At first, I'm OK with this.

Then my mam sends me a message saying "your sister is freaking out, your father just invited her to go to Nepal" and lo and behold, I also have a message from him, inviting me to go on holiday to Nepal. Remember, he is basically a stranger to us now, and neither of us are inclined to go places with him, least of all Nepal. We call him out on this, pointing out that neither of us are going to drop everything in order to go to Nepal with a stranger. He proceeds to tell us that it seemed like a good idea to go to "neutral territory" to talk things through and try to rebuild our relationship. My sister, understandably, tells him where to shove his trip. I tell him that grand gestures are not necessary, and that there's no such thing as neutral territory here. Especially with my sister and her volatile temper involved. He promptly starts the pity party, telling us he's all sort of horrible things and it's no wonder we don't love him. He also blames his mad idea on adhd rather than on his own assumption that we could be bought with grand gestures and that we would simply drop everything to go to Nepal for an unconfirmed amount of time. We both get fed up, explain that there are easier ways of rebuilding our relationship than ridiculously expensive holidays, and explain several of the ways he could attempt to rebuild. My main one was, you know, actually getting to know us as human beings rather than inanimate objects that stop existing when he stops talking to us. We also spell out in plain speech exactly why our relationship is the way it is. Everything he's done to us. Every eyewatering detail. His response? 

I don't get it.

After all that, he doesn't understand what he has to do in an attempt to rebuild our relationship. He doesn't understand why we won't accept his many excuses any more. He doesn't understand why mental illness is NOT an excuse for being an arsehole. He doesn't understand why we won't just forgive him and pretend like nothing happened. 

So back to my time in Melbourne, when we were supposed to meet up. I decided to change the rules, and bring my aunt (his sister) with me to the meeting, because I'm no longer comfortable with the idea of spending an entire day alone with him. So she comes with me, and we go to an art exhibition. My dad looks like he's swallowed a lemon crusted in rock salt, and instead of enjoying the exhibition with us, proceeds to avoid us for the entire time we're in there. On the plus side, he seemed to enjoy it. He refuses to speak to either of us until we go to lunch, deliberately choosing somewhere he would like because he's vegan. He finally brings himself to talk to us over a cheap (and rather unpleasant) vegan meal, which he thoroughly enjoys, and leaves after an hour. He goes back to not speaking to me afterwards, and I haven't heard from him since. 

When I am with his siblings and mother during my Melbourne visit, he's a regular topic of conversation. They all know what he's like by now. One sister, his brother and mother are all OK with me venting my anger over the entire situation, and wouldn't blame me for wanting to cut ties. One sister doesn't agree. She thinks I should push through and make an effort because he's my father. I'm of two minds. I'm a 28 year old woman at this point, I've put up with this for so long, I don't know if I have the patience for it any more. It's never going to change as long as my dad doesn't make any effort from his side. 

TL;DR: father invites my sister and I on a crazy adventure

wanting to cut ties with my dad