My Father's Legacy

Although I couldn't quite say how at the time, my father's affair explained things to me, provided some central piece of the quiet puzzle that was our home. Sitting with him on the patio that evening, I thought: that's what the silence was about; that's where the veils of sadness and tension came from; that's why I never saw my parents hug, or explode with passion or emotion or rage: all the energy went into hiding things, keeping the lid on feelings. I found the story of my father's affair utterly surprising and utterly validating at the same time, and I remember sipping my drink on the patio and saying, simple, "Oh."
~Caroline Knapp, Drinking: A Love Story 

Those of you who follow me on Twitter might have read a tweet a month of so ago in which I confessed I was reeling from something my father had told me the day before. Apropos of nothing, he made reference to his "mistress". Your...wha? I responded. "Well, I guess you'd call her that," he said. "We were having sex."
Now, it might be important to know that my father is 90 years old, if we're choosing to be charitable about his frame of mind. But he lives on his own. His short-term memory is a bit touch-and-go but he's lucid and sane and (mostly) reasonable.
So...his mistress.
You can probably imagine how I responded because it was the same, on a dramatically smaller scale, to D-Day.
Shock. You're...wha?
Fury.
Disgust.
Sadness.
This isn't the "mistress" we all knew about, the one who blew up my parent's marriage, the one who, he swears, was "just a friend". Nope, this is another one that preceded the secret friend. This one, he admits, was a physical affair. An actual mistress. A woman he worked with.
"Did Mom know?" I asked him.
No. No, she did not.
And therein lies my rage.
Because she deserved to know. She deserved to know exactly who she was married to. And, if she'd found out when I was old enough, I deserved to have the pleasure of helping her pack HIS bags and then taking her to the lawyer who, I would hope, would take HIM to the cleaners. 
So yes, fury. 
And disgust.
Sadness.
It was more than a month ago. Two weeks of not speaking to him at all, though prior to that I had called him daily and visited frequently.
And then, a phone call from my brother who "didn't want to know what this was about but wanted to remind you that dad is 90 so I don't want you to do something you'll regret." 
Seriously. 
The men in my life are the fucking KINGS of asking me to put aside my feelings in order to not make them uncomfortable. But always under the auspices of looking out for me. Of ensuring I don't "regret" my actions.
As if I hadn't thought of that.
So here I am.

He hasn't apologized for the pain he's caused.
He hasn't acknowledged that what he did was cruel and dishonest, though he did agree when I told him, to his face, that my mom deserved so much better than him. 
And I doubt he will. 
At 90, it's unlikely that he'll undergo any great reckoning. And yes, it happened decades ago. More than five decades ago, to be precise.
But, for me, it happened a month ago. Because a month ago, I realized, again, that my father is a coward. That he's kinda pathetic. That he never really learned a damn thing from the total hell he created when my mother discovered his secret friendship. That my mother deserved so much better than him.
Yes, he stopped cheating. He never cheated again, to hear him tell it.
And yes, my parents considered their marriage good, once they put it back together (absent my mother's knowledge of the previous sexual affair). 
But, on behalf of my mother and myself, I don't have to be the dutiful daughter. I can set the terms for my relationship with my father based exclusively on what works for me. I feel relieved of any sense of responsibility. I will have a relationship with him because I want my children to have a relationship with him. But I will not hide his poor choices. I will not pretend that my father is anything but a self-centered man, though I've spent so many years ignoring that inconvenient truth. 
I may soften over the next months. He is my father though this latest revelation has forced me to acknowledge that I have muted his faults over the years, that I have blurred his flaws.
A few years ago, I said to my husband, after being disappointed at my father's response to a request. "I guess my job is to forgive him for being who he is," I said. 
"Our job is to forgive everyone for being who they are," he responded.
"I found the story of my father's affair utterly surprising and utterly validating at the same time, and I remember sipping my drink on the patio and saying, simple, "Oh.""