What is "good parenting" anyway? Part Two - Fathers

Actually, this post is not about fathers generally, or what makes a good father. It is specifically about my dad, whose heart was in the right place but whose mind was so often elsewhere and whose soul was murdered, picked apart and pissed on long before his physical body gave up.

My dad might not have been, strictly speaking, a "good father", but he was certainly a good man. Troubled, trampled, blighted, disillusioned, intoxicated at least 50% of the time, and certainly weak and imprisoned by guilt and his own morbid addiction, he was nevertheless an awesomely intelligent and knowledgeable, magnanimous, inspirational, funny and articulate man whose love for me I never doubted, in spite of his many shortcomings and disastrous mistakes.

That's important, to feel loved by a parent.
It sounds obvious, I know, but it's really, really important.

And I loved him. In that disproportionately expansive, childishly idealistic way that daughters so often tend to regard their fathers, I hero-worshipped him. When I was a child, he used to tickle me until I couldn't breathe from laughing, hang me upside-down and twirl me around and call me funny names like "Popski" and "Babeoez". We even invented our own language - an absurd bastardisation of the English language, and private between me, him and my sister - therefore utterly nonsensical to everyone else. He was proud of me. Nobody in the world made me laugh like he could; being in his company was always a joyful, illuminating experience, even though underneath that larger-than-life ebullience he harboured a crippling amount of sorrow and regret.

It's just a shame that, as much as he loved me and my younger sister, he loved two things more: firstly, my mother, whose feelings and demands ALWAYS came first, no matter what (particularly AFTER the divorce), and even if they conflicted with those of his children, which they usually did. He was terrified of her, although he never admitted it, of course. And that terror was compounded by a gnawing, interminable guilt over what he had done, guilt that my mother capitalised on with merciless, vengeful fury, and which overshadowed his life right up until the day he died.

But even more than my mother, he loved alcohol. Which, in turn, hated him and everything else he loved, as tends to be the case with addicts and their addiction of choice.

My dad was not a violent drunk - he internalised all his rage and took most of it out on himself. Obviously, drinking the vast quantities of alcohol he did (as much as four bottles of red wine daily, plus spirits and beer at the weekends), was going to end up being fatal. I knew he was killing himself slowly, but I didn't want to confront that fact - and it was pointless anyway, because he didn't care about his health, and he certainly didn't listen to me when I gave him my 'concerned lectures'. He didn't even see a doctor for at least 25 years. So I stopped giving him concerned lectures, probably around the time I should have really started to lecture him even more. He was a stubborn bastard though. I'm not going to feel guilty about the fact he's dead; I just feel deeply sad, because he didn't deserve the life he had, and he certainly didn't deserve to die in such an undignified, hopeless and horrifying way (literally, all his essential organs simultaneously packed up) just a few months after finally retiring from a job he'd slaved away at for most of his life. I miss him terribly and would do anything for just one more day with him.

So, my dad was an 'enabling alcoholic'. He knew that his psychotic ex-wife was abusing his daughters, but he decided it probably wasn't that bad, and besides, alcoholism (like any drug addiction) renders the sufferer incapable of caring too much about others. It was much less stressful to simply turn a blind eye, and I do not blame him for that. What the hell could he do anyway? Stand up to her?! Impossible!

That isn't a criticism of my dad - I know he would have done so much more, if he hadn't felt so powerless, if he hadn't been so powerless. But this left my sister and I basically rudderless and adrift. As the daughters of a malignant narcissist who made our daily lives a living hell, and a dad entrenched in self-flagellating alcoholism and denial, I think I realised we'd have to quickly learn to 'parent' ourselves. But that had to begin with some self-respect, some self-love. Where were we going to get that from?