As If One Kind of Suffering Wasn't Enough

I have some advice for anyone going through the sudden painful implosion of a marriage - don't visit my father.

Everyone who knows my father warned me not to go, but unfortunately the plans were made before I discovered Dear Husband's Secret Life, and there was no way out.

I'm being unfair - my father was extraordinarily kind when he heard the news of my impending divorce. Despite being an inveterate philanderer who adored DH almost as much as he loves scotch and chocolate, my father took the news pretty well. He announced that DH had become a "non-person" to him.

However, despite his surprising support, my father remains my father, and spending five days with him at his summer house in Idaho is the family visit version of having dental work done without anesthetic. Here's a one-minute slice of our time together - a conversation that took place in a nice (for Idaho) restaurant on dad's 72nd birthday. Believe it or not, this is an actual conversation.

D- 'Aren't you going to have a drink with dinner?'

A- 'Dad, I was hoping it would have sunk in sometime during the past 11 years that I don't drink.'

D- 'Your life is empty.'

Not every minute of this trip was that excruciating. I had some fun at my father's expense - when he picked me up at the airport, he complained that some irresponsible bastard had hit his brand-new Jaguar and left without leaving a note. I examined the green-and-white paint transfer on his bumper and pointed out that I hadn't seen that color scheme on any vehicle other than a 1955 Nash Metro. I hypothesized that he may have in fact struck a building in a drunken stupor.

He roared back that he hadn't seen many buildings with that color scheme either. He made this statement just moments before we pulled up at his new summer home - a green-and-white house with traces of ice-blue Jaguar paint imbedded in one corner.

It may seem to an observer that the unbearable sharp pain of spending five days with my father might eclipse the dull throb of my collapsed marriage. But the two seemed to compound one another - an agonizing cocktail of misery that felt as if it would never end.

But now that I'm safely home in Los Angeles, the visit seems to have served its purpose - now that I no longer feel like I'm pounding my hand with the hammer of my father's personality, the slow pain of my split with DH is almost bearable.