When I was two and my sister was six, our father left us. This was a result of my mother tiring of his philandering, alcoholism, verbal, and sometimes physical, abuse. He was immature and narcissistic, and in the fifties the pressure to get married and start a family in your twenties was greater than it is now. He moved with his mistress, and tried weakly to stay in touch for a few years. His alcoholism got worse and he moved from city to city as he got fired from his jobs. He was not in touch with us during these years, and my mother was not able to successfully get him to provide child support.

For the most part, my mother did not speak disparagingly of him and provided responses to our questions about him with neutral facts. My mother had a full-time job that provided us with health care and a middle class no-frills existence. She believed in mental health care and when we were struggling as teenagers she put us in insurance-covered therapy, and sometimes even family therapy.

My father sobered up when I was a teenager. He wrote a letter to my sister attempting to reconnect and my mother facilitated a reconciliation by inviting him to see us. A few months after that visit, we went to stay with him for four weeks in his home city. He was still smoking weed and taking pills, and his behavior was still pretty immature and unpredictable, but he was trying to connect. Somehow from there I was able to maintain and deepen our connection, visiting him in his town once a year or once every two or three years. My sister chose not to maintain the connection. My father and I were not extremely close, but there was a special connection. I was more like him than like my mother or sister, and I recognized myself in his features, his quirks, his mannerisms, and his speech patterns.

I kept in regular touch with him from the time I was a teenager to his death, several years ago. He loved my children and my husband, and we are still close to his second wife.