Daddy Was Like Tiger; But He Wasn't A Golfer.

A few weeks before Christmas, I stood looking at my Dad’s picture on the mantle. He is flashing his winning smile standing among some beautiful flowers at a garden in Victoria, B.C.  He looks handsome and personable as always. The only reason I know about the setting of the garden is because the photo was given to me after his death by his long-time mistress. They went on a fun-filled tour of the Northwest together a few years before his death.

For awhile, he is going into exile, banished to a cabinet in my bedroom. I have no idea how long I will be mad at him.
I have a lot of daddy issues. I was an only child and you would think that I would have been the apple of his eye - but I wasn’t. I spent all of my childhood and a lot of my adult life trying to get his attention and any little scraps of time that he would throw my way. You see, it is my contention that if someone cares about you, he or she will spend time with you. I rarely saw him.
 
When I was a small child, I believed that he really was just “out of town on business,” because that was the story I was given by my mother. She actually convinced herself, through carefully practiced denial, that this was true. However, on occasion, the truth would bubble briefly to the surface. Once, when I was about 6 or 7, I went with her to pick up something at his secretary’s house. (Hey, it was the late ‘60s and that’s what they were called, OK? Secretaries Deal with it.) The attractive-looking woman who came to the door was stylishly dressed and had a really cool bouffant hairdo. I remember that, after we got back into the car, my mother got really angry and said, “That’s your daddy’s girlfriend!” (My mother is a series of blogs all on her own, possibly a novel. She’s kind of like a character out of a Tennessee Williams play. We’ll save her for another day!)
 
Children are very intuitive and pick up on many subtle and not-so-subtle clues that adults often ignore. For years, I suspected that Daddy couldn’t possibly be on business trips that much. I blamed myself for him not spending more time with me. I was a fat child for a spell and I thought maybe he didn’t like me because I was fat or because I had yellow teeth. (I had been given Tetracycline as a baby for an infection and it permanently stained my teeth. Even today’s tooth-bleaching technology can’t touch it.)  I have always been intelligent, but he seemed to take that for granted and I never really received any praise for my schoolwork. He seemed to gravitate to my younger cousins, who were both beauties with perfect teeth and pageant winners!
 
I finally got confirmation of what I had expected for years the summer between my sophomore and junior years in college.  I had obtained an internship in Atlanta for the summer. My father was living south of Atlanta in an apartment over his business. I thought that I could stay with him. Even though he had asked my mother for a divorce, she refused to remove herself from the “fantasy” that she still had a marriage. (Years later, I figured out why he didn’t get the divorce himself. At the time, he was a millionaire and he didn’t want her to get most of his money. But I digress!)
When I got to Atlanta, my father said he had a “good friend” that he wanted me to meet. We went to a fancy Sunday brunch in Dunwoody. He introduced me to his long-time love that day. I don’t remember what she was wearing. I do remember that I instantly liked her. I was actually happy to see him having fun and being happy. They were cute together and he was more emotionally available when he was around her. I liked that! He was always so grumpy and distant around my mother. I actually started to realize that daddy being gone so much was more because of his dysfunction with my mother than me.
 
As I have mentioned, this whole mess is very complicated. I eventually met his girlfriend’s three daughters. (They are not my half sisters.)  I became friends with his mistress. I was even there to console her and encourage her when he began fooling around on her with a woman that was young enough to be my older sister. (If you are keeping score, he was still married to my mother.) I’m very sure that there were many more “friends” that I never knew about.
The last straw came last month, when I learned that he had attempted to kiss and made a pass at a very good friend of mine when we were in college. This discovery happened to coincide with the Tiger Woods mess.
I think that Tiger’s kids are lucky, because they won’t have to act their way through a sham marriage for their parents’ sake. I wasn’t so lucky but, thanks to years of therapy and hard work on my own psyche, I am almost healed. I just need some time to process my feelings.
 
Meanwhile, Daddy’s picture will stay in the drawer until I can forgive him. I’m not ready to do that, yet!