OMG! I dig men, do you? And your questions are impossible to answer  in a box, and who’d read it all?  My father was great, AND because he was so fine, gave me a warped male role model as an ideal.  Weren’t all my guys going to be just like daddy?  HA!  No worries, my dad raised 2 fab brother’s for me (with the help of my mum), and now I have a cool son, so I still have great men in my life, although Dad is gone.  People change over the years - even parent’s.  Deal with it!

Re: ‘Dealing with it’ My father was the kind of man who is proud of his children and grandchildren to everyone he meets in public. In fact, he viewed his children as a nuisance and resented the intrusion into his relationship with his wife (my mother).

Now I am in the position where I need to provide care to both of them and it is quite difficult. They need help and it is given respectfully, but they are not respectful in return. Their children were not received as gifts, but as byproducts of their relationship in a time when contraception was not readily available.

Am I negatively influenced by my father’s emotions? Yes, I think so. Does this carry forward to my own family? No. I love my husband and children and appreciate them as gifts that have enriched my life and they reciprocate with their appreciation for me.

Wow - these posts make me extra thankful for my dad. He died when I was 30. He wasn’t a perfect dad. He wasn’t a perfect husband. He had an affair, divorced my mom and remarried. He drank too much. But he loved us kids. I think what I’ve realized as I’ve gotten older is that parents - as all role models - are just human. We all have our short comings. And ultimately we are all responsible for ourselves.

We were a family of six where my father provided the income and my mother provided the discipline. Therefore, my father was relatively absent during my childhood until I was a teenager even though he always lived with us. He had his temper when one of us got his mad. So he did scare us and we left him alone. Surprisingly, during the teen age years, he was more helpful than my mother was. So we all had a better relationship with him as we grew older. Then I realized in my older age, my mother had to put up with six kids on a daily basis for years and he saw us less because he worked. So of course, he would look better later. Plus, it shows, he just wasn’t good with little kids. In the end, I just think my parents shouldn’t have believed so much in being Catholics and had less children (5 children from 1954 to 1960, the 6th came six years later). All six of us would have had better childhoods. In our adulthood (four of us are over 50), we each have different gripes about our parents that looks like we’re never going to get over when some dumb thing sparks a bad childhood memory. By the way, they had a very good marriage. My father died on father’s day 2001 of the chemotherapy he was undergoing (not the cancer). My mother is beautiful, active and the same age as Debbie Reynolds at 76. But unfortunately for my mother, we have more bad memories from her than him, which makes sense. We spent more time with her. All six of us! But it’s not like we think about those memories until something happens, or like answering this question. Again, I’m positive MY parents would have been better parents if they’d had less children. (When I say that to my siblings, they know I’m saying it because I’m the second child and don’t appreciate my assessment.)

My Dad was my best friend.  I adored him as a child and my only sadness was in seeing him depressed.  Occasionally, his mother lived with us too, and her depression was worse.  When i hit my 30’s, I became clinically depressed and got on antidepressants.  I eventually urged my Dad to do the same.  I consider it a gift that I was able to do that because the remainder of his life was pretty much depression free.  He has been gone over 4 years now and I miss him every day.  I had the best Dad in the world.  Among his momemtos, I found a little piece of wood board he had kept, on which I had written in pencil, "I love my Daddy very much!"  That’s the kind of man he was.