I once asked my mother what the biggest challenge of her life had been. Without hesitation, she said, “Your daddy.”
Which explains why my relationship with my father was fraught with anger, hurt, and confusion as well as gratitude and love.
On the good side, Dad loved to play. He stoked my imagination with fanciful figures, monster chases, and Ferris wheel rides. He helped my sister and me with our homework, taught us to question received wisdom, and instilled a love of adventure. He was an unusual father of daughters in the mid-twentieth century, and he gave us the best of himself.
Many a Saturday morning, we made up stories about our special characters. I was Gertrude, Dad was Herman, and my sister was Eloise.
He wasn’t so generous with our mother. While fostering our self-esteem, he shredded hers. He had her waiting on him hand and foot. He flirted with other women, came on to his sister-in-law, and eventually left my mother for a long-haired manic-depressive whom he married and divorced within the space of six months.
Decades after he broke our little family up, he admitted that although he was a good father, he’d been a terrible husband. I wanted to tell him that to be a really good father, a man has to be good to his wife.
After all, how did he expect me to grow into a confident woman when he destroyed the confidence of my closest role-model? How did he think could I love him wholeheartedly when he kept humiliating my mother, whom I also loved? How could I not be angry, when, once I became a teenager, he wouldn’t stop complaining to me about his girlfriends, no matter how many times I asked him to stop?
A few years after I became a wife and mother myself, I began to resent his visits because he expected me to fetch and carry like Mom had. I fumed at his every request. They were for things he could do for himself, and they sparked memories of my mother waiting on him like a maid.
Like me, a lot of my friends have had complicated relationships with their dads. What was yours like? How do you understand it now?
Looking back, I’m glad my father was my father, flawed as he was. When I was little and couldn’t sleep, he would pick me up and sing “Old Man River” off-key. He taught me to love the mountains. He encouraged me to be who I am instead of trying to fit in where I don’t belong. And through it all, he made sure that I would never let a man treat me the way he treated my mother.