My counselor says Dad has a form of dementia. It's a subtle form and she says it explains a lot of the things I tell her about Dad. But here's the latest: he is reinventing some of the major events of our lives. And they usually are created in a way that makes him look good and others look bad. With his short-term memory shot, I find myself in a situation where I have to listen to the new versions of history getting repeated. There are two very recent (and by recent, I mean he's just started saying these in the last month or two)'recreations' that I am finding particularly hurtful:
1) He says my mother was pregnant with her second husband's child when they got divorced. This is not true. My mother divorced him because he was the one who wanted a divorce and 'let' her divorce him. This was apparently a good thing for her back in 1959. She remarried in 1961, and rumor has it she was pregnant. She told me she and my stepfather got married in Mexico in June but didn't tell anyone until Labor Day. My brother was born the following March. I think they really got married on Labor Day because I remember going to lunch with her on the June date she said wad the day they went to Mexico for his 'quickie' divorce from his first wife and their so-caled Mexican wedding. It sucks to have a kid with a great memory for stupid details; it can make your parenting lies blow up in your face. Whatever the case, she wasn't pregnant in early 1959 when Dad asked for a divorce. And let's not forget the elephant in the living room! My dad was gay! He had fallen in love with another man and he wanted to somehow pursue that relationship. Homosexuality was illegal back then, and if my mother had exposed him, he would have been put in jail, lost his livelihood, and then we all would have ended up on the streets. Letting her 'ask' for a divorce was part of the charade. Even after a divorce, he would have been our meal ticket. She needed to cover for him and agreed to do it. And for years she fiercely hid his secret. I gained so much admiration for her when I finally discovered what had really happened between her and Dad. After all she endured, he doesn't need to throw her under the bus.
2) He says that on my wedding day, we waited and waited for Bill, that we didn't know where he was, and finally had to drag him out of a poker game. Now it's completely true that Bill is addicted to gambling, and specifically poker. Poker is the mistress that ruined our relationship, the woman to whom he would run off time after time. He didn't gamble continually; his gambling was episodic. He would go for long periods of time without visiting a casino, and then one day,"Bam!" He'd come home unusually late. Or I would call him and he wouldn't answer his cell phone for hours. Or he'd make excuses for being away in the middle of the day. He'd say he was at the movies. He'd be late to pick up Laura from school when he supposedly didn't have anything he was going to do that day. Each episode would catch me by surprise because the time between these episodes be quite long, sometimes over a year and I would have been lulled into our routine, would not be suspicious, and my guard would be down. But on our wedding day, Bill and I stayed upstairs at my aunt and uncle's house, we dressed for our wedding together, drove to the ceremony together, and we weren't late. In fact, we were early. When Dad told me his latest version of my wedding day, I said, "Dad, the marriage was bad enough without you having to tell lies about our wedding day!" He said, "Well, then, what WERE we waiting all that time for?" "We didn't wait for anything, Dad! Bill and I drove to the wedding together. Nobody was late."
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