She made me do it, he says.

This afternoon I sat in the dining room at the nursing home in Kingsland, TX, with my father. His name is Dennis, and he is dying of MS and melanoma. I came here hoping for reconciliation and to say good-bye.

The business manager at the home is a kind-hearted woman named Dorthy (yes, that's how it's spelled). She adores him and loves to sit and discuss books with him. Yesterday she told me she hopes this visit will "heal my heart." She was referring to me and my heart. Her experience of Dennis is very different from mine.

I will leave town tomorrow relieved that I have done my duty as his responsible party. I have tried to be a loving daughter and enjoy his company this one last time. However, the reality is that my only sadness is that he repeatedly ruins our relationship. I'm very sad about what we could have had but didn't.

In an earlier blog post entitled "The Good Parent" I spoke about my father's sexual addiction. Now I will give you his version. I had my notebook with me and wrote down exactly what he said. These are his words, not mine:

I've changed since the last time you saw me. I'm a different man now.

I studied religion to become a minister. I studied science and became an expert on UFOs. I'm knowledgeable about the Bermuda Triangle. That's my passion. UFOs.

(Referring to Mother) Everything I wanted to do, she'd do it but then she'd stop. When I wanted to be around children. Then when I wanted to become a minister...It's hard to believe.

Then I wanted to go to college even though my parents couldn't afford it. I asked your mother, your grandmother but they wouldn't listen to it. It was 1954; they didn't have scholarships. And she wanted to go instead of me. She got pregnant with you.

I didn't want to lead the life that she wanted. The number of sexual partners that she had. I didn't want to lead that life. I didn't want to do that."

The problem is all that pornography that was in his office, all the sex talk with me, the abuse I don't talk about. She was never in the room. It was just him and me - Daddy's Girl. So, I will drive back over there tomorrow and collect some paperwork regarding his end-of-life business, say goodbye to him and walk out the door and never see him again. I hope.

P.S. He was jealous of my first husband, and now he's jealous of the new man in my life. How's that for a kicker. Sonofabitch.

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.