The Good Parent

My theory used to be that if God gave you a bad parent, he also gave you a good parent to make up for it. All my life, until middle age, I believed Mother was my bad parent because of her bipolar disorder. She didn't get the correct diagnosis until the early 80s when I was already a married woman with young children. That means during my whole childhood Mother was occasionally ill with something no one understood or could talk about. She was frequently medicated with, I suppose, transquilizers and other sedatives.

Because mental illness is isolating, our house was often a sad and lonely place. But God made it up to me by giving me Daddy. I look like my father, and he adored me. He was my Good Parent. I called him "Daddy" until 1997 when I was 43 and realized I had been sexually abused by him. Now I call him Dennis, and now he's dying.

This coming Wednesday I go to his nursing home in Kingsland to reconcile with him and possibly say good by for the last time. We've been estranged since 1997, and I haven't seen him since 2004. The last time I spoke to him was three or four years ago when he was in the hospital with a staph infection.

When he was a younger man he looked like a movie star - black hair, long eyelashes, blue eyes. He was always a charming man who loved women and slept with many of them. His sexual addiction was rampant during the 60's, and the swinging lifestyle in the suburbs of Dallas provided plenty of opportunities for fun.

His method of sexual abuse was unique. I'm not going to describe it in this blog as I have several friends and family members who might be reading this. I will just say it was subversive, damaging and horribly embarrassing. One thing he did was teach me, as a young girl, to hate my mother. He used me to make her jealous, so she resented my presence in the home. As a married woman, going to lunch with my father was like going on a date with an older man. It was charged with sexual tension, flirtation and sometimes gifts like nice jewelry. I call it Dating Daddy.

As it turned out, my good parent was my worst parent. How sad.