Daddy's Girl

I had breakfast with my 79 year old father yesterday. In a moment of vulnerability, I told him what Brother #1 and #2 have been urging me to tell him for the past 8 months. Our business is dying a slow painful death. Of course, the reason I hadn't told him up until now, is because he reacted the exact way I knew he would.

He scolded me, for I am really 11 years old.

My father--and please don't judge him, he is who he is--began to tell me all the things, in his mind, I had done wrong that caused our downfall. Of course, he knows absolutely nothing about our accidental business. The reason he knows little about it is because he believes to his very core that business owners are the enemy. We are greedy scum only looking out for ourselves. I grew up hearing versions of this. It is ingrained in who he is. I don't believe it. I accept he does.

Owning a business has been a conundrum for him. He is proud of me and he is astonished I would do such a horrible thing as participate in capitalism. So, the business failing in his mind is a relief. And it is also a reason to get on me about all the events I caused in the past fourteen years that brought me to this point. I stopped him twice, reminding him I did not want to hear what he had to say. There is nothing he can possibly add to what is going on in my life that will be the least bit productive. I also reminded him his response is the very reason he has been kept out of the information loop about what is going on with Marty and me.

It took three versions of the above as well as me reminding him I will be the one to pick his nursing home in order for him to stop talking. ("That's what happens when you don't hire a property management company and you have out of state rentals..." "But Dad, I had a property management company..." "Well maybe, but if you had managed them yourself, you wouldn't have had these problems..."--yes, this was really part of what was said). But eventually he allowed me to successfully change the subject and the rest of what he has to say about my mistakes he can relegate on my brothers. They have been warned.