Today is Fathers' Day, but you know, I don't miss my Dad at all.

[Archae]

He died 9 years ago, and in a way I'm happy about this.

My Father was extremely opinionated, racist, anti-Semitic, Faux "news" junkie, (he was a Faux "news" type long before Faux "news" existed,) and "he was always right!"

He didn't beat us, or my Mom.
But he didn't know how to actually be a Father.

And his racism wasn't the "KKK" type, it was more the "Keep them out of MY neighborhood!" types.
He moved a couple times because black families moved into house blocks away.

And he blamed the Jews themselves for the Holocaust.
"They picked on Germans!"
How'd he know this? One of his bar buddies told him.

Oh, the history books not mentioning this?
My Dad told me it was because the Jews control the media, including book writers and sellers.

And he could quote the Bible to make excuses for his views and actions, practically at will.
(He hated Catholics, too, and disowned my sister for joining a Catholic church so she could enroll her kids in a Catholic school.)

He was also a long-time conspiracy theory follower.

So with it being Fathers' Day, I'm not sad my own Father is gone.

[snowybirdie]

1. Sad for you

[Sherman A1]

2. Mind took off when I was 6 weeks old

I saw him a few times through the years, but he never had any interest in his first family. He died in the early 1980s and I heard about it a year after the fact. My only interest in him is from a genealogical standpoint to trace family history to preceding generations .

Never knew him, don’t really care one way or the other.

[Aristus]

3. Me either, I'm sorry to say.

He died ten years ago, and what would have been his 79th birthday just passed, and I merely shrugged.

He wasn't a racist like your father, but he was a troubled, often unpleasant person. Most of that stemmed from things that were not his fault. But, despite the large number of people who wanted to help him with his issues, he never devoted himself to the effort to overcome his faults.

I was much closer to my wife's father, who died four years ago. He and my father shared a birthday, and when the day came, I missed my f-i-l much more than my Dad.

[Faux pas]

5. Drinking, cheating

and violence ruined any chance my father had of being a good dad.

[no_hypocrisy]

6. I'm with you. I'm glad my father's gone and

I don't have to pretend to celebrate.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

7. Sad to hear... hope Mother's Day makes up for it.

[Archae]

9. For me every day is Mother's Day.

I call her (or she calls me) every day, and I love being with her.

She even looks up to me, with all the things that went wrong in my life I could have ended up a criminal and/or insane, but I'm pretty much on an even keel, just taking life one day at a time.

[InAbLuEsTaTe]

10. Now that's GREAT to hear!! So happy for you!!

[Ohiogal]

8. My dad was 48 years old when I was born

He was a “functioning alcoholic “ most of his life but got worse in his later years. Most people who didn’t know him well thought he was charming and witty, but he sure wasn’t that way at home.

He was smart, had two postgraduate degrees, but he was very racist, bigoted, and controlling.

He died suddenly when I was 28. I had my own life by then, of course. We were not close.

[redstatebluegirl]

11. I had a love hate relationship with my Dad.

He was horribly abusive to my Mother, but I wanted a Dad so I tried like hell to get him to love me. We all know that never works. My Grandpa made up for him in so many ways.

[RainCaster]

12. I miss my father in law, he was a great man

He was a great example for me about how a father should be.

[bikebloke]

13. Good riddance to mine.

The thing was that my mother was far, far worse. A fucking monster from whom I endured a lot of verbal and physical violence. So my father appeared the good guy. In actuality, he was also the bad guy, constantly demanding failure so he could pretend he was superior. Not to mention endless braggadocio and lies. My gift to humanity was not breeding and passing their genes into the future.

[Wounded Bear]

14. My dad passed when I was 18 by a couple of months...

I hardly miss him because I hardly knew him. He was what we used to call an "absentee" father. He didn't travel or anything and they weren't divorced, but he worked long hours-not unusual for the 50's/60's, and he drank a bit. I don't remember much about his drinking habits because it didn't happen much at home. But he was gone a lot.

Shortly after he retired, he had a stroke and lived the last few years of his life wheelchair bound, half paralyzed, and we cared for him best we could back then. He finally passed when I was stationed in Memphis as a young Marine in tech school.

My mother passed around 6 years later, while I was deployed in Yuma AZ. As the youngest of 6 kids, I never knew either of my parents as an adult.

Sounds like your dad was Archie Bunker. I guess we Americans loved that character so much we 'elected' him president.

[mopinko]

15. that's what the day means for a lot of us.

my dad was an alcoholic, died when i was 17.
it took me a long, long time to sort out that i hated him, but i was crushed by his death. part of that was losing the home i had lived all those 17 years, which haunts my dreams to this day.

when i started my urban farm 7 years ago, at 58, i began to make peace w him.
my irish farming ancestry and my years of helping my dad in the garden (usually before he started drinking for the day) added up to having all the tools i needed when a great opportunity dropped on me. these things, keeping critters, growing things, were what kept me from falling into the traps that were laid for me by those same genes.
i was able to accept that he gave me great gifts. it always drove my mom a little nuts that i was so much like him. and i see those gifts in my own kids, and i am grateful all over again.
my only brother and i are the only ones who carry any affection for him at all. and we both do it through heavy scars.

but here is a thing-
as a mom, i failed in a whole lot of ways myself. some of it because of my physical and mental health issues. some of it because i am a sucker for a big idea, and sometimes pursue stuff i should know i cant pull off.
when i divorced their dad 5 years ago, my kids all turned their backs on me for a good long time.

prolly no accident that it was during a time when i had to try to forgive myself that i found a way to forgive him.