After finally closing the door on my relationship with my narcisstic mother, I find myself more and more angry and confused by my feelings toward my father, the enabler. All my life, he lived to please her, followed her rules, danced around her mood swings. They teamed up against me, they were a team united. Because he was the kinder, softer, more nurturing parent, I did feel I could complain to him about the horrific things my mother said or did. Most of the times he would just shrug sadly, say "What do you want me to do?" or more recently, say nothing at all. He lived to please her and seemed to expect me to as well. Often, if I did something to keep the peace, he would make a very big show out of telling me how much this pleased my mother, and I would look at him, baffled, wondering if he actually thought I should be happy about this. He depended on me to be the bigger person, even as a child. He depended on me to turn the other cheek, every time, to say nothing, to apologize for things that were not my fault, to always be the one to smoothe things over. In the past few years, he didn't want to hear a single word against her, he allowed himself to slowly be cut off from me, allowing her to control their email, his cell phone, and the phone. He would not give out any direct contact information. Any phone call I had with him was shared with her in the background and when I told him this was disturbing, he got mad at me and did not understand. Everything he has ever said and done one-on-one was framed in the context of how it would make my mother feel. We couldn't do things that would make her feel "left out". More and more when I would try to explain how she made me feel when she did something, he would yell at me, even hang up on me if I called him at work, and blindly defend her. His favorite thing to say was, "I've never seen her do that" as a cowardly way of not getting involved.

I am conflicted because on one hand he is a kind, loving, deeply compassionate man in direct opposition to the cold, brittle, shell of a woman who is my mother and who, I know, has made his life a living hell. On the same end, more than once he will announce to me, emotionally, that she is the "love of his life" and I can only sit in confused silence, wondering how on earth I am supposed to react to that? How could she be the love of his life when she has emotionally abused her children since they were born and that he knows it? But then I think, his feelings were more important than mine. It was more important to him that I fall in line to keep the peace, because it made his life easier. Did he ever really love me at all? Is he just another of her victims?

He already lost one of his children to her. My sibling has not been in contact for 10 years and never will be again. And now he has lost me, too. Today I am very angry at my father. Angry for thinking that this is okay. Angry for not hearing me. Angry for not protecting me. Angry for being weak. Angry for being brainwashed. Other days I feel sad, a deep, painful loss, because he was really the only parent in a true parent/child relationship that I ever had and I actually think he is in so deep, he will never understand why I have reached this point. I am 40 years old. In many ways, like my mother, he has thought he could still control me, manage my emotions, and guilt trip and gaslight me. I don't know what to think about him anymore. But today, today I am very angry.