Motives

I feel like I have been making my dad look like a jerk when I talk about him. He's not a jerk. I mean, he hasn't cheated on my mom, he goes to work every morning and comes home from evening, he read the entire Little House on the Prairie series to me, he volunteers at church, and he even leads Bible studies periodically.

I just wish he would find a two bedroom condo so that Mary and I could spend the night at his place sometime. Mom says he didn't get a two bedroom 'cus he doesn't believe that Mary and I would want to spend the night and he doesn't want us to feel obligated to spend time with him. If that's true, I don't know where he got that idea from -Mary and I don't call him every night asking him to hang out with us, but I think that's 'cus we wish that, for once, he would call us and plan an activity.

It's funny though, everything about my dad that I have thought about recently, I never even had an inkling of before college. I never saw it before then. Now I see it everywhere. I hope I am not judging him too harshly. But for goodness sakes, mom+Mary+me spent two hours with him on Sunday going through advertisements and telling him what kind of desktop we wanted/asking his opinion. However, he then goes and buys a laptop (with nothing near the specifications we had discussed) and gets ticked off when we tell him that we told him we wanted something else (the desktop we wanted was cheaper than what he bought us...). He threatened to make my mom pay for the laptop that he supposedly brought over as a "gift." Gift? I think it was more like, "I bought you this lovely laptop (that you didn't want), so that proves I am a good person, please let me move back in and just forget this divorce thing."

He has changed his actions slightly, but I feel like his motivation is to convince my mom not to divorce, whereas what it needs to be is to love my mom and my sister and me. Most of his actions alone would seem to say he cares, but it just feels like he is trying to desperately to persuade instead of desperately wanting to get to know us and have deep relationships with us.