(TW: Quick suicide mention sorta? Food mention.)
I'm going to apologize in advance if some of this comes off as a little pissy. But I'm I think reasonably confused by part of this, we'll get to it.

I'm 22 turning 23, and I live with my parents and I'm on my father's insurance. I need to be in therapy as a bare minimum. I'm paralyzed by fear daily. It took me 20 min to knock on a door of someone's bedroom today so I could call the cat to come eat. Never mind the lack of a career and you know general sucky stuff blah blah blah.

I'm so paralyzed by fear and being a burden that I've been trying for 3 months to ask my dad about seeing a therapist. I already picked it. I just need his help with info for the insurance part, including his SSN. (Side note: Is it normal to get the insurance holder's SSN? I've never been asked for this before. The office in definitely legit but what the heck?)

There is of course the general fear of asking. But I have a bribe now: I don't get to make my birthday cake until I ask him (It's this week.) and it's going to be a very cool cake (I'm trying mirror glaze for the first time!) and I have a history of bad birthdays so it's up to be to take this into my own hands and fix it! So I have to ask him about it before Friday at the latest.

Now the huge issue. My stepmom..... Follows him around like, I swear to god, a puppy dog. Either that or she does the leading and drags him around the house to do XYZ. I can count on both hands the times I've gotten to speak to my father at length since moving here 6 months ago. Maaaaybe this is a side effect of going from loveless household to not-loveless-but-kinda-weird-relationship-household but this.... Does not seem normal and kind of gets on my nerves.

I can only speak to him alone. My stepmom has to be gone. But I can't text him and go "hey I need to talk to you" because she will see the text and ask what happened. I don't want her to know. There was an incident where the first time I told my mom I suffered from mental health issues she told the whole family because she thought I was going to kill myself. (Unreasonably) And I don't want my stepmom putting me on blast to my stepsiblings.

I thought about asking him to take me to the store to get the cake stuff to "make sure they buy the right things" but my dad works and on-call job and I have to watch a baby for most of the week so the chance of 1. having time 2. having my dad take me and not my stepmom are both very low.

Does anyone have any bright ideas about how to handle this? Or am I right in my assumption this will be another cakeless kind of shitty birthday? lol Please no "tough love" bc I hate it to pieces.