My late father was a world-class mathematician. He was also an alcoholic with two serious disabilities: one congenital and one caused by polio, which together with his childhood of abject poverty contributed to his treatment of me. This alternated between emotional violence and humiliation, then cloying affection. He veered between incredibly nasty and very loving. I went on to marry an equally capricious man whom I left when his appalling behaviour began to affect our children. My son, a ‘disappointment’ to his father, took his own life in 2012, and my daughter, a loving mother herself now, still launches verbal attacks on me like her father used to. I later married a dependable man, but his heavy smoking and drinking has affected his health and there is distance between us even though we love each other.
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