Apologies this is going to be a long one. Need to vent!
I was most likely the result of a one night stand back in the 1970s to two abusive and mentally unstable people. They got married, as that is what you did back then, apparently, and had a stormy, violent, abusive relationship which ended a few years’ later. I am my father’s only child.
My father was an inadequate parent who didn’t turn up for contact, intermittently paid maintenance, turned up drunk to contact and was physically and verbally abusive etc. He eventually moved on to his second. wife, who had her own issues.
In my early teenage years (1980s) my father announced to me that I would not be getting much for Christmas because he had just returned from his honeymoon in Australia and all of his money would be put towards emigrating. My father subsequently emigrated with his new family and that was that.
I was very upset and felt abandoned. Over the years I tried writing to him (no internet back then and phone calls far too expensive) he would sometimes write once and then expect me to correspond with his wife. When I was 18 I asked if I could visit, no response. I asked again a couple of times after that but was ignored.
I had DD in my late 20s and really wanted to connect with my family. My step-mother assured me my father was desperate to see me and my father seemed overjoyed when I confirmed we would fly out to see him. The trip was a disaster. My father said that I looked too much like my mother and my accent was guttural and then spent the majority of his time in his computer room smoking cigarettes. My father refused to support my application to emigrate as he did not want me sponging off him. He also sniggered when his dog bit my DD.
Following this trip, I shut the door firmly on him, even blocking his emails as he sent some horrible messages.
Fast forward to now. My father’s wife has passed away, he is in poor health, living in a rural community and is extremely vulnerable. Family contacted me and I felt obliged to make contact with him out of pity. Phone calls (all costs covered by me) were mainly positive, although we mainly talked about him and he showed very little interest in his grandchildren.
I recently flew out on my own to see him as his prognosis is not good. Unfortunately, our already fragile relationship crumbled because he insisted that he needed a tactile relationship with me because in his words ‘he needs to be touched.’ I am not a huggy, kissey person and could not do this with an almost complete stranger. He kept saying that his wife was always hugging him and I think he wanted me to take over that role. Apparently, he is emotionally scarred because of his experience of being evacuated during the war and was also abused by his father and my mother.
The situation came to a head when he informed me that he would not have been in contact with me if his wife was still alive because he would be busy doing other things. I stopped any further discussion after that statement and walked away. He did his usual thing of sending nasty messages which I didn’t react to.
So here I am, feeling like a complete idiot for getting sucked in by that narcissist, he has done this to me so many times and I am so annoyed that I allowed myself to get pulled in again. That was absolutely the last time! I’ve written this down because I need to stop giving it headspace but I’m so upset and angry and wonder if I should have done something differently, but am not sure what.
Thanks for reading if you got this far.