BY DOTTIE WILSON | Father’s Day is a yearly reminder of the reprehensible and shameful character flaw I have in the eyes of others: i.e., you are a horrible person if you don’t like said sacred figurehead. (I understand there’s even a religious commandment about such devotion.)
Forever branded by my honest yet unpopular opinion of a universally worshipped and overrated household icon, the day is a special occasion for me to feel stigmatized and marginalized.
Whenever you hear about a “dad gone bad,” it’s usually a Little League coach or a celebrity. Regardless, any time a woman comes out and admits she hates her father, she is looked down upon by all of society. You are damaged goods. There’s something wrong with you. It may be the age of “Lean In” and HBO “Girls,” yet this opprobrium is still a frustrating reality. For decades, I’ve hung onto a Dear Abby column, entitled “No Dad’s Better Than Abusive One,” and this illuminating and defensive scrap of paper is the only ammunition I’ve ever had to justify my belief when attempt to “sell it.”
Celebrated nonetheless, the man who hit my mother when she was pregnant with me was a frightening, dangerous menace. When I was eight years old getting ready for bed, he called me to come into his room. Wearing pastel yellow flannel pajamas and drinking a beer, he wanted to show off his gun. A pistol, it was way heavier than the toys my brother and I used to play with. He said it wasn’t loaded, and I could shoot it. But thanks to massive consumption of unintentionally instructive film and television programming, I opened the chamber and found a bullet. (I hadn’t trusted him, even then; there were earlier awful memories.) Flabbergasted, he said, “Don’t tell your Mother.” Yet I’m the demon child who’s frowned upon?
Of course it could have been worse. We kids occasionally got spanked with a triangular ruler (he was an engineer), but were never severely beaten or sexually abused. We went to day camp and college, had a nice yard and pool. Unfortunately, we had to endure furious and violent condemnations and rants at all hours (including school nights). It was petrifying! Crazy electrical and construction accidents, along with deafening symphonies and maniacal “big band” jazz music (followed by visits from the police), were recurrent events.
He was an angry mad scientist with an Ivy League degree, consuming massive amounts of alcohol on top of powerful painkillers. The drug and liquor stores both made regular deliveries to our house, which was constantly lit up like a nightclub. He drank and drove all the time with us in the car, and there had to be at least one case of beer in it at all times. It was an embarrassing and scary environment of insanity, fear and chaos.
As an adult, my “dream dad” almost came true. “It” had died (that’s what we called him, seriously), and my mother met a wonderful widower named Howard (which just so happened to be her dreadful middle name). Throughout their charming and proper engagement, she looked 10 years younger, full of life. I was so happy. But I thought I’d die when this dear sweet man suffered a fatal heart attack just weeks before the wedding.
Devastated, I met his darling adult children, who were amazed he’d let my mother drive his car (it just wasn’t done), or that her Italian greyhound was allowed to jump up on him. They were astonished he took care of her dog when she went away for a week. My father would have killed the animal, like he did with our fish (dumped an entire container of food in the tank, along with the container, and suffocated them).
When left to take care of his own elderly mother, who had an “accident” after dinner, he pushed her outside in the backyard on a cold November night, made her strip naked and used a garden hose on her like an animal. My poor Grandma. My poor Mother. (Forget about the neighbors. The stories they could tell… .)
No way did I go to my father’s funeral. Yet I immediately got on a plane to Savannah, Georgia, when Howard passed away. After my mother showed me the pretty wedding reception cocktail napkins (silver script on pastel pink) for the sorrowfully cancelled occasion, I felt like Scarlett O’Hara’s emotionally drained and disturbed father in “Gone With The Wind,” when he was fiddling around with his beloved dead wife’s fancy earrings.
Before the wake, my mother and I exchanged her bridal outfit (a beautiful, sensible, light coral-colored suit with subtle ruffles on the collar and hem) for a subdued black dress with sparse splashes of dark red and orange roses. The people at the church service pronounced the word “amen” with a long vowel, while my mother and I used a schwa. He was buried at Bonaventure Cemetery, not far from the lovely gravesite in the movie “Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.”
As for my father, I remember everything. No one “planted” anything in my head (like what the Woody Allen people said about his daughter Dylan when she shared her early childhood thoughts about a despicable dad). The revelation that a woman hates her father can damage one’s core reputation, hurt your feelings and/or possible relationships. Women who’ve been deprived of having a decent father need to be careful with their confessions to others, and society shouldn’t view them as misfits. So Dylan, let’s do lunch. Because “I’m O.K., you’re O.K.”
