Anonymous wrote:OP has a daddy complex, clearly.

Anonymous wrote:How do you know she didn't occasionally vent to her friends or complain to your father?

Anonymous wrote:I read this forum and I think back to my own mother. She never did seem to whine or complain about the trials of being a wife and mothers. She took it all on without complete and did most things with aplomb. She was a military spouse who also had her own career, and could handle just about anything around the house and didn't need my father there to get it done. In fact, she spent two years home alone with two kids and held down a job while my father did two tours overseas in combat zones. She was grateful for every day she had with my father, and recognized that when he was not at home he was out earning the money that made virtually everything in our lives possible. When he left the service for civilian life but kept flying for the Air Force Reserve, she recognized that the weekends he was gone were paying for college for all three of us kids.

There seem to be so many people posting such hateful anti-husband things on these threads who do not really realize how good they have it. Whatever happened to the American pioneer woman who could birth babies while crossing deserts and fighting off hostile Indians, put down a homestead on the prairie, help harvest the crops and raise the kids at the same time. Have we all become a nation of whining, entitled bitches? Our foremothers would cringe.

Anonymous wrote:OP here, we suspect that my father suffered from some sort of PTSD as a result of his combat experiences and that he handled this well while flying - maybe it was his coping mechanism. The drink came on hard after that, and we kids were out of the house. My mother struggled for years with it - until the day my Dad died. She attended Al-Anon, and she has a hard time accepting that alcoholism is a disease. However, despite this, she misses my father every day. They shared a love of sports and football and it was a basis for conversations that she says are harder to have. Every morning before he left the house, my father would leave a cartoon or other article that struck him with a note for my mother to read when she got up. It is these little rituals that she misses. We do not know what demons my father wrestled with. As a younger man, he was involved in covert operations and the only thing he ever revealed about his experiences over Laos in 1968 - and this to my uncle - was that he went on a rescue mission and was too late, "they were all dead."

I remember two experiences with my father, one while he was alive and another after he died. I attended his Naval Academy class reunion with him in the late 80s, and met a classmate of his - a USMC veteran - whom my father saved in Vietnam. That man told me that if "it weren't for my father, I woudn't be here nor would my children."

After my father died, my mother received a condolence note from a classmate of my father. The gentleman had been flying a VO-67 observation mission over Laos in February 1968 when his aircraft was hit by anti-aircraft fire and crashed in the jungle. The writer noted that my father was the "pilot of the Jolly Green that plucked him out of the jungle in 1968." My mother has said my father was a different man when he returned from Vietnam. Perhaps it was the war that did get him in the end.

Whatever happened to the American pioneer woman who could birth babies while crossing deserts and fighting off hostile Indians, put down a homestead on the prairie, help harvest the crops and raise the kids at the same time

Anonymous wrote:@20:42 My parents were not rich, but they did give us the things we they could afford. We all had part time jobs in HS and I worked through college. Thought my childhood was pretty typical for a white middle class kid growing up in the 70s and 80s. The rich kids in my HS all drove fancy sports cars to school. I used my parents Buick Century station wagon. My sister worked to buy her own Nissan Sentra. I was blessed to have the childhood I did, but not privileged!

Anonymous wrote:Sorry dear, but all three of us children are quite well adjusted - and not one of us is a whiny, entitled bitch. We support and love our husbands and are thankful every single day for what they do to support our families.

I wish I could find the quotation my father used in eulogizing his father. It was something to the effect that mothers get all the credit while fathers are underrated. Yet, it was his father, always in the background, who was the strength and support for his children, as he was for us. I am not diminishing my mother's role. She did her part too. However, I think we as a society, and especially a good number of the posters on this group, bash the fathers of their children as "useless" or "uninvolved." Perhaps some are, but I bet most are doing the best they know how, just as you are.