🙌 Asshole dads club. A few years ago he gave all the clothes I had in a closet at his house to Goodwill. One example of his behavior Fortunately my mother is amazing. I attribute all of my positive traits to her or her side of the family. I even look like them. My dad is not particularly attractive so win for me. Sad thing is if I had a more stable dad my mom might be the crazy one. Her family tends towards dysfunctional but in a much more manageable way. I have a pretty normal step dad now but he's not without fault. I think he may have taken the fatherly lessons of 1950s television a bit too much to heart
This is exactly the problem I'm dealing with: in my cosmology, my mom was the bad one. My dad, freed from the constraints of his terrible wife, wasn't supposed to be so terrible. About six months after she left him he actually said "we were dealing with a lot of shit when you were born and didn't really have a handle on it until your sister was born. By then you'd moved on and didn't really need us anymore so you never really had any parenting and for that I'm sorry." It was more of a mea culpa as I ever figured possible and reflected a modicum of self-awareness. It appears to have been temporary, however, and these tiny little moments were the fingerholds I was clinging to for a sense of normalcy. And as of Sunday, they have slipped away.