girlfiend

I’ve written plenty about how crazy my mother is but it’s only occasionally that I remember that my father’s crazy too. He has plenty of neuroses and quirks that border on obsessive-compulsive and the past few years I’ve worried that he’s exhibiting some signs of dementia. His memory is shot. For years he’s been telling the same stories repeatedly, each time explaining that he just saw it on TV a few weeks ago. He does this with everyone he encounters, no matter how often he sees them. Since the Fiendling was born, just about every time he sees me he asks when I’m planning on returning to work. My answer has never changed. Each time he asks I tell him that when the child(ren) is school age I’ll return to teaching. Each time he does not recall that he’s asked the question before.

It troubles me, and I’d like to talk with him but my father is extremely defensive and is incapable of serious discussion. He also has a tendency to explode with the slightest provocation. Once when the Fiendling was an infant my dad came to drop something off in the afternoon. The Fiendling, who did not nap regularly, was unexpectedly sleeping. When my dad arrived I rushed outside to meet him before he could ring the bell or knock. I quietly told him that the baby was sleeping and asked him to be quiet. Inexplicably he took great offense and stormed off, cursing. I chased after him and apologized for offending him and he accepted my apology, but his anger was so sudden, so unexpected it’s changed the way I approach him.

Today my dad met me at the car dealership where I dropped my car off for the inspection scheduled for tomorrow morning. My mom’s in town for the night so she can watch the Fiendling tomorrow during my doctor’s appointment which is scheduled for the same time as the inspection and she’s staying with him, not me, because we stress each other out too much. The two of them planned to come over for dinner tonight anyway, and we worked it out so I’d use my dad’s car tomorrow to get to my doctor’s appointment and get the Fiendling (who now naps regularly, but only in the car) down for a nap. It sounds convoluted, but my mom drove directly to the house and my dad met me at the dealership and gave me a ride home in his car.

Here’s where the crazy comes in. My dad is a classic aggressive driver. He swerves between lanes if someone in front of him is driving too slowly. He blows through stop signs and drives on the shoulder of the road if there’s traffic. He honks at green lights if someone hesitates for a second before accelerating and honks if someone dares to slow down a bit before putting on their left turn signal. He’s compulsive about being on time and drives recklessly to make sure that he’s never late. It’s a wonder he doesn’t get pulled over regularly.

This evening, on our drive home, the weather was miserable. It was still light out, but the rain and clouds made visibility pretty poor. Before we met my mom at my house we had to pick up dinner from a Chinese place my dad likes. We pulled out of the dealership and my dad immediately made an illegal left turn onto the busy street. Traffic was slow because it was rush hour and because the weather was miserable. He swerved back and forth between lanes trying to make up time so we wouldn’t be late to pick up the food, nearly causing a few accidents. We neared a dangerous bend in the road where the speed limit drops to 10 miles an hour. There are few side streets off of the curve that make the bend even more of a hazard. A friend from high school lived on one of those streets and making the left off of the curve was always a little scary. I was just telling my father about that when the car in front of us hit the turn and suddenly slowed and put on the turn signal to turn onto my friend’s street. My dad who was not driving 10 miles an hour around the curve slammed on his brakes and pounded on the horn. He skidded around the car nearly sideswiping the car in the right lane. At the next break in traffic he switched into the right lane and approached a yellow light. It turned red. My dad didn’t stop. I asked, “Dad are you going to run that red light?” He said yes, and did. I was grateful that the cars who had the green were accelerating at a normal rate, saw my dad blowing through and braked without incident. Terrified, I said, “Dad, you know I’m six and half months pregnant, right? And that was really dangerous” He jokingly replied, “Oh, you are?” not really connecting to the danger part of my question.

The rest of the drive didn’t get much better. It was pouring rain and it got completely dark. He missed a turn and got annoyed. To make up for the extra thirty seconds in traffic he drove in the turning lane, nearly colliding with a car that was correctly using the lane to merge into traffic after making a turn out of a parking lot. We picked up the Chinese food.  Then he ran three stop signs in my neighborhood, not even tapping the brakes at two of them. After the third stop sign I very calmly said, “Dad, please don’t run through red lights and stop signs when I’m in the car. It makes me very nervous.” He made two right turns on red at lights with signs proclaiming ‘No Turn on Red’ immediately thereafter.

I was terrified and furious. The thing that bothers me most is that tomorrow when I see him again to return his car and tell him again that his driving made me very uncomfortable he will probably become enraged and insist his driving was perfectly safe, never mind the fact that at least 6 different vehicles slammed on the brakes and honked their horns as a direct result of his driving. In a day or two he’ll get over his anger and act like nothing ever happened. Or else in a day or two he’ll genuinely forget that anything happened. Obviously I can’t drive with him any more. It’s just not safe. But I also fear for his safety and I don’t know what to do about it.