I got the dreaded phone call from my father today. A day late, of course. He said he’d tried to call me yesterday, but that’s funny, since I hadn’t missed any calls on my cell phone. And my cell phone is usually very good about telling me about missed calls.
My parents separated mid-summer last year, after nearly 28 years of marriage. (I was born approximately two months before they were married.) It was the second marriage for both of them. Separation was something they had threatened each other with since I was in high school. I kind of wish they had figured it out then, because being an adult child of divorce (well, technically, they’re not really divorced yet, but you know what I mean) is tricky.
I live with my mom. The last month we all lived together in a house, my dad didn’t bother to pay for any of the living expenses. So my mom ended up paying all the rent and all the bills and having to come up with all the move-in money for the new apartment. (I had just taken a serious pay cut in what was then my lousy $12,000/year income. Which is another story for another time.) Luckily, her parents have not been opposed to helping us out. It took us almost a full year after the move to pay down a ridiculously high and overdue electric bill. One that my dad had said he would pay. During heated arguments before the separation, my father would call me ungrateful. He had paid for a new laptop computer for me the previous Christmas, and threatened to take it back. He had allowed me to put a full set of new tires on his account at Les Schwab, and he threatened to take those back. Never mind that I had needed the tires to replace ones that were so worn, it was likely I would have an accident on the road trip I was taking. Never mind that I was paying for those tires in monthly installments. He was like a bully on a playground.
At that point, I had lived with my parents for a couple of years. I had quit a well-paying job at a horrifically-run company in another city and opted to move home, live cheaply, and take whatever life threw at me. Life has a nasty sense of humor.
Living with my parents again after living by myself as an adult, I came to the realization that my dad is very immature. I love him, and I worry about him, and it pains me to say something like that, but it’s true. He is also a borderline misogynist. He actually told my mom, in front of me, that he expected her to have dinner ready and keep the house clean. Apparently in addition to working a full-time job. Cooking and cleaning was women’s work, he said. Of course, you would think that would mean that lawn care and home maintenance might be his province, but he never showed any signs of pulling that kind of weight. He worked, and that was it. He felt it was all he should be expected to do.
Any money problems were also automatically my mom’s fault, a result of her mismanaging the family finances, what with all of her bill paying and grocery buying. Any money problems had absolutely nothing to do with the fact that my dad could drop a grand at the casino in the blink of an eye. That was his money, he could do whatever he wanted to with it.
Today’s phone call was the first time I’d heard from my dad since last December. He had been sick and had gone into the hospital. There were tests that needed to be done and, when he got out, he said he would call me and let me know how everything was going. I never heard from him. At least, not until a few months later, when he forwarded me the notice from the Department of Licensing about the tabs on my car needing to be renewed (it’s registered in my parents’ names, and his address was somehow chosen for the mailing). He addressed the letter to me c/o my mom. Which was the first sign of weirdness. Why not just address it to me? This is my address. I pay rent here. Then he opened the letter simply “Daughter,” — what the hell is that supposed to mean? He’d never written me a letter before, sure, but he’d never used that single word in a birthday card or on anything he’d written in my entire life. And why not “Dear Daughter”? Why just “Daughter”? It was so cold, so utterly removed from my reality, that I decided then and there that I wasn’t going to be made to feel like a bad person because I expected my father to be the parent in our relationship.
Even today, he couldn’t resist the urge to chastise me for not calling him. It’s a wonder I don’t, when every conversation I’ve had with him since my parents went their separate ways has to include some dig about what a bad child I am.
