By: Revanche

How and why I’m cutting off my father

November 13, 2017

I thought I was rocked back on my heels before.

I had a painful and necessary conversation with a friend last weekend. It was about feelings, which I mostly hate, money, which I love, and family, which I am 100% conflicted about. The conversation itself was tough but what followed was far worse than anything anticipated.

I supported my parents more than half my life because I genuinely believed my parents loved me and I wanted to help them. Turns out, Mom loved me, but Dad? He skated on the strength of her love and sacrifice which was so strong he could mimic both just from the reflected glow.

My theory is that, for Dad, love only mattered so long as my path mirrored his. When I was a dependent child, and when I was an adult covering his expenses, my interests were aligned with his. Mostly. He was never willing to put aside his own pride, and sense of self entitlement, for my sake, though. He may love me but much less than his perceived needs.

In hindsight, it feels like I should have seen the signs earlier.

I thought the worst was his betrayal which has demanded an appropriate response. Since the confession and the (maybe sincere but does it matter?) apology, I’ve been edgy with the need to make changes and the rent increase this year further pushed the issue out front. But I was tied up in co-managing the renovation of our new home and juggling two homes so for my sanity, I talked to his younger sister for moral support, and did my best to get through that period.

(You may recall he promised to get a job and supplement the increased rent – he made a couple deposits into my checking account in the summer with respectable amounts. Just one month later, his twice a month deposits turned into once a month deposits, then the amount was halved – all without an explanation. And even with a 6 month grace period bought on my dime, he still hasn’t done anything about finding a cheaper place to live. Who’s surprised? Anyone? Anyone? Bueller?)

Our house renovation is largely over now and my anger has not subsided. For months, I’ve been trying to let go of the betrayal-anger so I could calmly decide the best course of action, but a couple weeks ago he asked me to do something to benefit him that would put me at risk.

How can I stop being mad at someone for gut-punching me when he hasn’t stopped? I’m fuming. I don’t want to be estranged from my remaining parent but I am so angry that I haven’t been able to find forgiveness in any part of myself. I’m so incensed that my desire for a good relationship with my parent, a connection to my past, and a grandparent for my child – all of that is invisible against my towering fury that my father would steal from me and my child. If he’s capable of this, what else would he do? How will he hurt me – us – next? It’s not a matter of if.

Thus, the conversation with my eldest friend and life advisor. She strongly felt that I was justified in allowing my desire, fueled though it is by anger, be fulfilled.

California has filial support laws so even as we discussed the various ways I have to remove him from our finances, I could still end up financially responsible for him in his last or later years. That burns. But it gave me my first step: I exercised the EAP option of a free legal consultation. While brief, the lawyer was blunt. STOP. He was blatantly incredulous that I’ve supported him this long – most of our call was him confirming our background and asking why the hell I was still doing it.

I realize it’s a foreign concept, in American culture, but our family culture dictated this was part of my duty. In a healthy relationship, this is my duty but, as my most filial-pious aunts lamented, it should not have started so early or lasted so long. Early on, Mom’s declining health required my help, but he’s in good health. It shouldn’t have continued after her death. It would be acceptable if I was already established, making good income, but I was a child when this started and now I have a child of my own. In the normal course of things, the parent helps their financially supporting child with housework and/or childcare. That the last time he truly helped me was 12 years ago slipped past me, like a frog slowly being boiled alive. I always had faith that my parent was a good person so I didn’t ask anything of him except his honesty and fair efforts.

The events of the past year have burned away my trust and illusions, cementing my resolve to change our situation.

Having finally come to the painful decision that he needed to stand on his own so long as he’s in good health, I knew I’d risk estrangement from him, which I accept, and estrangement from his side of the family, which I hoped wouldn’t have to happen. I called the two aunts I care most about to inform them of my decision. Their reactions wouldn’t change my course of action but I hoped they would take it well.

After three hours talking with my aunts, I’ve come away with a deeper sense of relief and betrayal than I thought possible. Blind I have been. I feel like a dupe.

Why was I fooled?

We all were. Me the most, I assume.

He’s been lying to his siblings so they didn’t know anything about my severe and chronic pain, nor how much I worked to keep the family afloat. They were already frustrated with him over his callous use of me (their words), and he always told them to butt out of “his” business when they encouraged him to do better by me. They are both unilaterally supportive about cutting him off now they understand my half of the equation. Their immediate agreement that my responsibility to JB comes before my duty to my parent lifted a huge burden from my heart. I’ll do what I think is right regardless of what anyone else thinks, but I was grateful that I wouldn’t be battling misguided, well meaning aunts too. This is painful enough, it would hurt dreadfully to lose them too.

In turn, I didn’t know he had been ignoring their pleas for him to apply for senior housing since Mom passed, over six years ago.

He gave me just enough information to extrapolate an (incorrect) assumption. He’s always hustled to bring in a bit and he was getting a little non-means-tested assistance – enough to pay for food, gas and utilities but he was always behind. I only covered rent, car insurance, and his cheap cell phone plan, some basic utilities when they were late, to reduce enabling on my part. The economies he described, living without heat or a/c in all but the most extreme conditions, to save money sounded like he was already as miserable as he could be. A sensible person asks: why aren’t you moving to a cheaper better place?

Housing in Southern California is expensive so I believed him when he claimed there was nothing to be had. I also know that moving to reduce expenses involves more expenses: first and last months’ rent, time to move, moving costs, etc. I did not know he neglected to tell me he could have applied for senior housing years ago but was choosing not to.

I also didn’t know that he’s been piling up debt with other family all these years instead of moderating his lifestyle to meet our reduced circumstances. I assumed most of his failures to make thoughtful, rational decisions were recent, stemming from grief over losing mom. After all, my distracted grieving led to a few mistakes of my own – though I still gritted my teeth competing for, and winning, a massive promotion in the six months after she died. I didn’t have a choice – I needed the money because we were supporting two households.

I was wrong on all counts.

This is all part of a pattern that I would have recognized if I knew the history. He’s been piling up debt for decades! My elderly aunt has been quietly paying off his personal debts to family, covering for him by calling it a loan, because she too felt the sting of familial shame that I feel now. She’s 8 years his senior, has been a single mom for almost 50 years, on a limited income, and he’s been taking her care and generosity without even a summary thanks. I’m deeply ashamed that he could behave so badly.

I could hardly believe my ears as my aunt relayed her memories but I’ve considered the source. She gains nothing by lying to me. She still loves him even if she is angry with his choices. She’s definitely far too Zen Buddhist to feed me lies as revenge for his lifetime of abusing privileges. She’s forgiven far greater transgressions in the name of maintaining a peaceful soul per the very pacifist and forgiving kind of Buddhism she practices.

I wish she told me before but I know why she didn’t. She confirmed it, too. They all owe him a life debt – when they all fled their war torn country as refugees, he risked his life to ensure the entire family’s safe arrival in America. But now that I’ve learned enough about the rest of his character to question it, she is free to tell me what she’s witnessed.

When I think of the days turned into years that my joints were swollen into immobility, the weeks PiC had to prop me up with pillows to work from bed because I couldn’t take a sick day even if my joints were on fire, that I’ve given up all my hobbies to conserve my energy for work, the years of my life and health I sacrificed for his benefit, knowing that he could have eased some of my burden and actively chose not to … I’m not sure I have the capacity for that level of forgiveness.

I don’t know how much he borrowed from whom and I can’t shake a shadow of guilt for not asking.  I don’t have it in me to settle those debts. I had no part of those debts, like I had no part of the business debts that he piled up. I felt obligated to pay those hundreds of thousands of debt because those business debts were incurred during the time I was dependent on them for support so I benefited from the business but even that’s a stretch. I was a kid, I wasn’t responsible for the decisions that my dad made to make a living.

And, oh, the shame. He raised me to be honest, hard working, upstanding. To take care of my obligations, social or professional or otherwise, that your actions reflect on your parents and family. (See: misplaced guilt above about his debts that HE incurred. I blame him because Mom preferred a normal job and supporting us with a 9-to-5. He refused to and she was obligated to follow his lead since she was raising us, he spoke better English, and he would have pursued entrepreneurship with or without her support.) I looked to my parents and grandparents as examples of people of good character, trustworthy and honorable. To find that he is not that person, that he is someone who would put me in a position that I would never put him in, that this is all a repeat of his behavior as a young man shaming his own parents with his spendthrift ways, has broken my heart.

I feel terrible for myself and even more for Mom. She was an incredibly hardworking woman marrying into, she thought, a good family. The irony that Grandma never let up tormenting Mom for being from a desperately poor family in the evil MIL tradition as if her son hung the moon, even while she enabled his debt-ridden ways… my family is so screwed up. I don’t know when Mom figured out what kind of man she married but she couldn’t have changed him. Even if she left him, which is almost totally unacceptable in our culture, that would have left us more poor and without a father. Since our welfare was always Mom’s top priority, that wasn’t an option. As appalling as I find his personal behaviors now, he acted like a good father who cared about us during our formative years. He wasn’t an abusive father back then, he was just absent. He was good enough for me to believe good men exist, and refused to settle, so I found PiC. Maybe I would have had high standards even without him but that’s conjecture. My reality is that my parents, their example of a seemingly healthy marriage with mutual respect, figured largely in the foundation of my decision-making: I would not have accepted less than that.

Conversely, Dad’s choices during my early adulthood eroded my trust in adults with each bad decision even as I chalked it up to misunderstandings or misguided good intentions. PiC accepts that I’ve an unprecedented level of control-freakness about money in large part because of Dad and humors it without complaint. (Aside from that, we both know I’m best at this.) If I had known the true fabric of Dad’s character before, I would have made very different decisions with him, just as I have with my brother.

He has brought shame on the entire family, as has my brother, in the exact way he always schooled me against.

I repudiate that shame by refusing to stay his victim or enabler. Whether he knows he did me wrong or ever admits it is irrelevant – I have no control over that. I can only break the cycle of silence and enabling that everyone from his mother to his siblings to myself, however unwittingly at the time, perpetuated. This stops with me.

If he truly does only value me as a source of money then time will bear out that truth and I will be as frank as is age appropriate with JB as to why zir grandfather isn’t in zir life.

I didn’t expect a perfect father but based on my childhood, I did have every reason to expect him to behave honorably. I did the best I could with the information available to me. His failure to do the same cannot be my failure.

We are now facing significant therapy bills for JuggerBaby so, even if I wanted to, we don’t have the cash to support him. I’d warned him months ago that our resources would be severely limited by the end of summer so this isn’t a surprise even if it feels like just desserts for all the times he’s dumped multi-thousand dollar emergencies on me. He was told that this wasn’t sustainable months ago and he has since avoided all discussion of his thinking, possible solutions, or even acknowledging the timeline. Since May, he’s only called when he needed something. I suspect, fairly or not, he assumed his enterprising and overachieving dupe of a daughter would find a way to make money happen like I always have.

But it’s not my job to toss what’s left of my health to take on a second and third job again (circa 2000-2005) to cover his bills. It’s my job to be a good person to the best of my abilities. I’ve done my daughterly duty to give him every opportunity to change his life and circumstances. It can’t be my fault he’s done very little with it. It’s now time to be an excellent person for myself and primary family and friends. I can’t do that if I’m killing myself trying to make ends meet still despite our two good incomes. I can’t have patience when I’m irritable over being used as I will be if this goes on.

It’s time.

Untangling filial responsibility

We are paying most of his rent (though I’m not on the rental agreement anymore, thank goodness), some of his utilities, his car insurance, and he drives my old car.

Rent and utilities. I originally thought to give him a deadline some months from now to find a new, cheaper, place to live. At a guess, it would cost at least a move-in deposit that we’d never see again, some moving money, maybe a trip to the house to take what last things matter to me, if anything.

The lawyer’s advice, though, was that the support had to end right away. I don’t know what this means for that one heirloom from grandma that I think is still in my old desk but I’ll try to devise a way to retrieve it.

Car insurance and car. This liability worried me most. I don’t think he would deliberately damage the vehicle because it’s his only car, I also have operated on the assumption that he would always deal with me in good faith, and that was stupid. He’s made bad decision after bad decision: lent my sibling a car he had no right to lend, let a car get repossessed instead of being honest with me, oh yes, once again, stole money from me, and that’s just the big stuff that I can link to.

The easiest way to eliminate our liability is to transfer the title to the car. (whine) I don’t want to.

I am very attached to that car – that was my first big purchase, my first car, I paid it off early entirely on my own, and it symbolizes the early part of my adulthood. I wanted to pass it on to JuggerBaby… they don’t make that car anymore! Why on earth I’ve embued this one thing with so much importance, I don’t know, it’s totally irrational.

Ok. Now to knock it off and transfer the damn title.

At least in the state of California, it’s free to transfer title. Yay? But not free to request a duplicate because I can’t find the dang thing. RATS.

Phone. He’s currently $12 a month on our T-Mobile family plan. I’ll have to make a recommendation of a discount plan for him port his phone number to a plan he pays for himself.

I’ve gone back and forth on this a little. Surely $12/month is feasible to make sure he still has a phone? But I think in the interest of a clean break I should probably not float that idea.

This won’t be fun, and it won’t be easy. The idea of having any conversations with him about this aside from my point blank statement of the facts makes me sick to my stomach. His MO in any challenging scenario has been to press me for more effort to buy him more time and the very idea of hearing him ask me for more right now … I’m working on compose myself but I need some time for this Vesuvian-level heat to simmer down lest I spontaneously combust speaking to him.

This probably can’t all be figured out by email and voicemail tag however much I want to avoid having to speak to or see him. But I’m going to wait until I’m ready to pick up the phone. Besides, it’s not like I was having fun before.

This isn’t the end

I’m not the first, nor will I be the last, child to whom a parent has been less than worthy. My story isn’t unique in the grand scheme of a world rife with parents doing wrong by their kids.

It’s just my story. Supporting my parental family unit has been the foundation of my financial life all this time and while I don’t believe this is going to be the end of it because he will age and will need help late in life, this is a sea change. I don’t know what happens next.

I’ve never flipped to the end of the book to sneak a peek at the ending before but if I could, I’d be sorely tempted.

I know that we’ll continue to work, save, and invest. We’ll be working hard with JB on zir speech, we’ll be working on our home and building relationships with people who love us and reciprocate our support. I can’t control or predict what he’ll do. I hope he’ll start making better choices.

Maybe we’ll all be ok in the end. I hope so. I hope you’ll wait and see with me.

Updates: starting the process (1), setting and maintaining the boundaries despite manipulation (2), standing firm against the pressure (3), closing that chapter (4).

Sharing is caring!

Email

Twitter

Pinterest

0