Stories of quarrels and belligerence show the dark side of Father’s Day

The last time my father hit me, I was 17 years old.

I do not remember the first time he hit me, only the last. I received less of the physical abuse than my older sister, but he had plenty of emotional and verbal abuse to go round, too. We were belittled, ridiculed, treated like we were stupid and generally made to feel like bad, unworthy children for not being better and more grateful to our father.

The last time he hit me, I hit back. I stood up to him and I told him he would never hit any of us again. To my knowledge, he has not. About five years later, he was finally put on a decent medication that seemed to control his extreme unpredictable mood swings. I remember it as a peaceful time. I was able to forgive him for many things because I could see a different person than the one who had so hurt me and my mom and siblings.

I am 38 now and he will soon be 66. I will never love my father the way that other people love theirs. These days he still has mood swings, but there is no violence. He remains selfish, childish and prone to bouts of extreme negativity. I don't blame him for every bad event in my life, but nearly every day I see some quirk in my personality that is directly related to something he did when I was a child.

His illness affected my childhood. It influenced how I thought about myself, how I viewed my friends and how I saw the world. His erratic behavior and emotional abuse damaged my ability to trust. To this day, during an argument, my instinct is to yell really loud and then run and hide. And that is exactly what I did the last time I saw him, three days ago.

When it comes to our parents, do we ever stop being children?

My sister and I drove to the little town in Alabama that had been our "other" home as little girls but seemed surreal and alien to us as young women. We learned that our father was taking good care of our two half-siblings and was helping to raise his girlfriend's three kids. He had moved on. My sister and I together prepared speeches: what we would say to the man who had abandoned us, who had missed seeing us grow up and who no longer knew us at all.

"Are you going to yell at him?" my sister asked me.

"Yeah," I said, "He deserves it."

But, when I did see my father for the first time in seven years, with silver in his hair and wrinkles on his face, and when he saw me—no longer a little girl, but a young woman—I burst into tears. My father cradled me in his arms, and I smelled his aftershave, and I vividly remembered a day, so many years before, when he had picked me up from kindergarten, held me against his cheek and said, "There's my little girl."

And there I was. And here I am today. Eight years after reuniting with my father, I can't say that I've fully forgiven him, and I can't say that I ever truly will. There aren't enough apologies to make up for missing the most formative years of my life, but, in the time that I've been reunited with my father, we've both gradually learned to accept that he made a terrible mistake—many terrible mistakes—but that we can forgive, and apologize, and atone for our wrongdoings.

It's strange, but after 26 years of being my father's daughter, it's only been in the last two that I have actually felt like we are family. He isn't perfect, and he didn't raise me, and he hurt me by abandoning me when I needed him. But, when I see my father today, I see a father—one who made his share of mistakes, but one who is, at the end of the day, the only dad I've got.

I didn't think I was rushing into things. My husband and I met in college, and we didn't date long before he asked me to marry him, but we were engaged for just over a year before we said our vows.

You wouldn't know it to look at my dad's smiling face in all the wedding pictures, but the last words my father said to me as we started down the aisle were, "It's not too late to change your mind." I responded by taking a purposeful step forward in my giant white poof of a dress.

At the time, I saw my dad's words at the wedding as being unsupportive. Looking back, as a parent, I can see that he just loved me and was worried I was rushing into a choice I might regret. At 20, I felt all grown up, but now at 41, I look back at my pictures and see such a young girl.

My dad turned 70 this year. The hair that started turning gray the year I got married is silvery white now. He and my mom love my husband, and they adore our kids. That rough year is long behind us.

In the end, I decided that my dad was supporting me on my wedding day the best way he knew how, by telling me it was OK no matter what I chose, even to the last moment before I said, "I do." I know because once the vows were taken, he never stopped supporting my marriage, and that's what counts.