My Dad Belittled My Work For Years. Then I Received An Email That Told A Very Different Story.

“Stop running naked through the streets, humiliating your family!” my dad emailed.

It was the eve of my birthday, and I’d just published a well-received, emotional New York Times essay about why I regretted never having children. After many friends and female students had let me know they’d found my words illuminating and helpful, I’d considered it a triumph. Now I stared at my screen, feeling like a failure who’d hurt the person I cared about most.

I was a happily married, popular teacher in my 50s who’d spent years in therapy with a paternal figure who’d helped me quit drinking and smoking cigarettes (a vice I’d shared with my real father). Yet now I morphed back into a little girl at the Michigan dinner table offering my opinion disagreeing with my brothers, shattered when my doctor father yelled, “Shut up, you’re stupid, you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

He’d always favored my three younger siblings, who were conservative Midwest science brains like he was. When I was a teenager, he hated my lefty politics, Bob Dylan albums, feminism, and penchant for provocative authors like Erica Jong and Phillip Roth. When I’d moved to New York to get my graduate degree at 20, he made fun of my confessional poetry, asking, “Ya gonna sell your poems on the sidewalk?” While initially impressed when I was paid for my humorous relationship pieces in women’s magazines, he’d sniffed that I was “freelance everything.”

“Your relatives aren’t your audience,” Dr. Winters insisted when I was 43 and Random House bought “Five Men Who Broke My Heart,” my sex, drugs and marriage memoir that they’d abhorred.

We’d spent hours analyzing how my father had emulated his own gruff Dad, my Grandpa Harry, who’d never forgiven him for not