The Myth of the “Great Dad" and the Reality of Child Neglect

Trigger Warning: Child abuse both physical and sexual, serious neglect

I have come to realize that my father was not the great man everyone insists he was. People love to build legends out of the bare minimum, and he benefited from that more than most. They thought he was the world's greatest man and father, because he was raising two girls "all by himself".

My sister was raised by her best friend's family, in their home, where she essentially lived from age 7 to 15. I stayed home until I was ten and moved in with my mother for a year. Then St. Ann's and being trained like a wild dog. Ma and St. Ann's staff were the people who taught me how to fake it enough to survive in normal people situations. 

The truth about Dad is simpler and uglier. He did not protect me. He did not teach me. He did not discipline me. He neglected me so thoroughly that it shaped the entire trajectory of my childhood.

I always had lice. My clothes were dirty. Kids at school pinched their noses when I walked by and called me Pigpen like in Peanuts. I never got breakfast. He often forgot to give me lunch money. I would come home starving and chew on raw spaghetti or plain bread because I did not know how to cook anything...

I told him over and over that his girlfriend was hitting me and forcing me to look at her genitals and touch her breasts. He believed her when she denied it and said I was a pathological liar. All of this happened before I turned ten.

At ten I lived with my mother for a year. I learned to bathe. I no longer had lice. I ate regular meals. I had undies for the first time, and they had the days of the week on them. I always picked the right day very carefully. But living there fell apart because of my psychiatric issues, which were extreme, and I was sent back to my father after a year.

Between Christmas and June of 1976 I attended three different schools. After that I hid in my bedroom for four months until he finally put me in residential treatment. That was the only time he parented correctly.

(He did parenting right when avoiding the issue by sending me away to what was essentially a mental hospital was the correct action. He made me Somebody Else's Problem, or an SEP, as Douglas Adams puts it. Go figure.)

During those four months, I would come out late at night, fry some bread, make a mayonnaise or ketchup sandwich, get ice water, and go back to my room. I spent three years at Saint Ann’s learning how to control myself in public.

I went home at fourteen to a father who was smoking weed on the couch with his friends and handing it to me too. His friends thought I was pretty sexy, and I ended up in bed with more than one of them. He was aware, told me and them to stop, but didn't take any action beyond two or three sentences. If my friend was having sex with my 14 year old kid, that "friend" would be persona non grata, and lucky as hell if I didn't report them to the police.

I started partying and not coming home. Nothing happened. No consequences. No guidance. No structure. It is no surprise I got pregnant at fourteen and again at fifteen. One abortion. One baby born after I turned sixteen. And the neglect did not stop there. It just changed shape.

When I was seventeen, he moved out of the house but did not take me with him. He was fine with the housemates kicking me out of the home he held the lease for. He put me in a rooming house instead, and a few months later he could not afford it anymore because the cancer made him too sick to work. I had no idea how to find a job or keep one. So at seventeen I was homeless, eating one hot dog a day and filling up on ice water just to feel full. By the time I was eating regularly, I weighed 97 pounds and you could count my ribs.

(As an aside, when I could finally eat regularly after a childhood and teen years of hunger, I ate everything in sight. I spent my early adult years chubby, and when I married and stopped working outside the house, the weight piled on. I was 300 pounds when my 35 year old kid was born, and never dropped the baby weight. I am now 370, and battling to lose weight. I've actually wished I was back in what I call the Hunger Years.)

It took the kindness of a total stranger named Paul to pull me off the curb and teach me how to survive. He sheltered me, fed me, and taught me the adult life skills my father never bothered to give me.

People rarely are the heroes others make them out to be. My father certainly was not. Of course I am enraged about him and the way I was raised. It is not strange that I failed miserably with my now 35 year old child, neglecting them so badly that they have not spoken to me in years? And of course I tried as hard as I could to avoid neglecting the three kids I gained through marrying Sam, or failing them the way my father failed me. I swung too far in the opposite direction and buried them under rules and discipline because I was terrified of repeating his mistakes. I was trying to build the structure I never had, and in doing so I created a different kind of damage.

My three kids I adopted went No Contact with me for differing amounts of time, but have now forgiven me. My 35 year old has not, and likely will not, and I will bear the pain of that for the rest of my life, of knowing that I made their life so miserable that they don't want the first thing to do with me, and will be relieved when I am dead.

Dad died in August when I was 17 I turned 18 several months later. I am now 61. For 44 years now his friends have told me how great and good he was, and I have gone along, played the dutiful, loving, grieving daughter, keeping his memory sacred. And she is in there, yes, that grieving young woman. But the angry, neglected, ignored child is in ascendancy right now, and the truth about his parenting needs to come out, raw and difficult to face as it might be.

I cannot confront him with this, he has been ashes for over 40 years. But I can pour it out in words, and hope that doing so brings some healing to my scarred psyche.