My Mother Threw My Toddler’s Soup Down the Drain and Told Me to Get Out — She’d Forgotten Whose Name Was on the Deed

He’s caught in the middle.

He does love me, he just can’t show it around her.

I had built, out of my need to be loved by him, a whole theory of my father as a good man imprisoned by a difficult wife, a passive victim of the same force that oppressed me, and therefore not responsible, not culpable, deserving of my sympathy rather than my anger.

And it was a comforting theory, and it was false.