Reply to Read my Dad's memoir; description of my childhood was a gut punch

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]My Dad left my mother for his affair partner after 16 years of marriage; my sister and I were 12 and 14 respectively. He had sold our family home and moved all of us to another state for his job, then decided he wanted to be with AP, who had a toddler at the time. My mom took my sister and I back to our home city, Dad moved AP and the toddler to the new city, and that was that. Needless to say, it scarred us all. My sister and I are both successful and I'm a SMBC, but neither of us got married. I think we never recovered from the mushroom cloud of what happened in our early adolescence.

We've stayed close with my Dad (AP died of cancer and Dad remarried again), but as I've gotten older and become a parent myself, I find his choices during my childhood to be breathtakingly selfish. We never lived in the same city with him again. We saw him for summers and holidays, and that was pretty much it. This was compounded when he recently compounded his life story into a book and sent copies to my sister and I (and also my mother!). He devoted a single paragraph to the divorce and our resulting family split, including noting how much I "lambasted" him (his word) over the phone about the divorce during this time. Well, yes. I was a 12 yo girl who's Dad left their family for another woman and child. I was devastated.

My Dad now wants to talk about all of this, is querying my sister and I if we've "read his book". What makes me sad is that it's full of other great stories...he's had an interesting, successful life. I'm glad to have his personal history written down and it will be meaningful when he passes away. But I had to work hard to make peace with what happened during my childhood, and seeing in black and white how easily he justified his behavior gutted me.

I thought I had closed this wound, and I'm not looking for beef with my 79 yo father. It's so hard when people we love let us down.[/quote]

what is a SMBC?

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saturday_Morning_Breakfast_Cereal[/quote]

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