Well, probably my father.
Even though he has always been the one providing for the whole family, he was an absolutely terrible father and husband. In our relationship, the only way to avoid upsetting him was for me to be completely submissive and suppress any expression of my own personality. Otherwise, he would start complaining, getting angry, picking fights, or manipulating me through shame and guilt.
Starting around the age of 14 or 15, he began constantly pressuring me because he thought there was something "wrong" with me.
He would say things like: "When I was your age (whether I was 15, 17, 19, and so on), I had already bought myself a car" (he had actually made money by scamming people out of u.s. dollars in the USSR, where private currency exchange was illegal), "and I was driving around and fucking girls in it. But you're not like that. There's something wrong with you"
One of my earliest childhood memories is from when I was three years old. He took me to a local bar, then left me there while he spent hours gambling on slot machines (slot machines weren't banned in Ukraine until 2009, so back then they could be found in many bars and beer pubs.) I kept begging him to take me home, but we stayed there for about six hours because he didn't want to stop gambling.
He constantly fought with my mother. There wasn't a huge amount of physical violence, but he often grabbed her by the arms and regularly tried to throw her out of the house during their arguments. Once, he hit her in the face with the metal buckle of his belt. I also described elsewhere the incident where he shoved her so hard that she hit her head on the floor, and afterward he threatened suicide. Those experiences had a profoundly destructive impact on me.
Like many abusive alcoholics, he could be incredibly cruel to his own family, but when it came to dealing with other men, he was a complete coward.
Nobody knows this, and I have never told my mother because it would destroy her. Basically, he had an affair with the woman whose child he later became the godfather of. While he was spending his time drinking in local bars, he met a woman and slept with her. Later, he introduced her to one of his closest friends. After some time, she married that friend, they had a child, named the child after my father, and my father became the child's godfather.
Now, once a month on the weekend, my father wants to invite these "people who are closest to his heart" over to our house.
The most ridiculous part is how I found out. He told me all of this seven years ago while I was seriously ill with a fever of 39.5. Then he simply forgot he had ever told me.
Why do I think that? Because last year I had the first and last major confrontation with him. His behavior pushed me into a complete emotional breakdown. Yet after that argument, he suddenly decided he wanted to lecture me about, as he put it, "things you never wanted to know, but which you will learn and act accordingly": "about family life and how a man should treat both his wife and his mistresses." He told me that there are women who get into your heart and make you break all the rules you've lived by, and that the same woman ā the one whose child he later became the godfather of ā was one of those women.
I cut him off at that point, but that doesn't change the fact that he's a complete asshole.
