Tit for Tat

The more emotional distance I put between myself and the situation with my father, the more the answer came clearly. This is the fight worth having.

My father had an affair. He proposed to my step-mother while he was still married. He wanted to wake me from my bed in the middle of the night to tell me he was leaving and my mother screamed at him to at least wait until morning. "Let the children have one more night of good sleep," she said. "Because it will be the last good sleep they'll have." And then he picked up and left.

But what I'm doing is morally reprehensible.

I feel like he is saying it's okay to cheat and divorce, as long as you don't move in with your new family before heading to the court house. And I will never accept that. I will never be okay with that.

This isn't about the apartment; this is about my father forgoing his chance at righteousness when I was 5 years old. He forfeited ever passing judgment on me. Luckily for me, he was so busy with his 4 new children that he didn't have time to tell me what to do. I'm not sure he ever showed enough interest in what I was doing, good or bad.

And now I'm on the eve of my 27th birthday. I am full-time employed with my name on a lease and car title. I feel like the raising has been done and it's a little too late to begin parenting.

I will never accept his hypocrisy in this situation. I feel very strongly about this. If I went out to dinner with him and pretended things were okay, I would not be true to myself or my ideals. I feel the same about even maintaining a relationship with him. Yesterday I asked him to stop hurting me and the man said no. This is the fight worth having.

So I went home and sat down with Scott and I told him my decision.

"I have never seen you so upset as you have been in the past couple of days," he said. "I'm going through my family stuff too, but this has affected you differently. You've just been so hurt and anguished." Scott took a deep breath, "So I called him."

"You talked to my father?" I blinked.

"Yes."

"You went into the lion's den without any armor?"

"Yes. I didn't want to be the wedge between you two. I told him that I meant no disrespect to him by moving in with you. I told him that my intentions were honorable. He liked hearing that. And I told him the real reason I signed your lease."

"YOU DID WHAT?" I gasped.

"Relax, I said that my lease ended in February and that's when I moved in because my name has been on this lease all along. Anyway, your father did most of the talking and he didn't say it outright, but he alluded that he just needs more time to get used to this, and that eventually he will be okay with all of this," he gestured. "He said you hurt him, he hurt you, and now it's time to move on."

"What the hell is this, the Bible? He's just doing this for his 'eye for an eye'?" I crossed my arms and slouched against the back of the couch.

"I'm not defending him, I'm just telling you what he said," Scott explained.

"If he's so hurt and upset, why does he want to have dinner so much?" I grumbled.

"He doesn't want to do it at the expense of missing your birthday. I told him I would talk to you when you got home and you would call him with your decision about dinner tomorrow," Scott finished.

I rolled my eyes. I was prepared for war. My battle ax was sharpened and aimed at the enemy. But if Scott can man up and call my father, and my father can make concessions, then I guess I can too. A lot of people are invested my relationship and I would be disrupting the family balance.

I picked up the phone. "You can go to my step-sister's apartment when she's cohabitating, and you can not care if my brother did this, but you sure as hell aren't coming to my apartment. I think that makes you cruel." I sighed, "but I will come to dinner."

At 9 a.m. this morning my phone rang. "Fine. We'll be at your place at 7," my father said.

"But I didn't clean."