It's complicated. The older I get the more I understand that he was doing pretty well with the tools he was given.

On the one hand, he was there for me more than most dads, took off equal time to care for me as an infant, pulled his weight around the house, never spoke rudely to his family, spent hours teaching me hobbies and skills, and told me he loved me and was proud of me often.

On the other, he is deeply insecure and compensates for that with arrogance. He taught me that the most important thing is to be better than everybody else. He taught me that being wrong is humiliating. He hates fat people, women who perform femininity too assiduously, women who don't perform femininity assiduously enough, men who disagree with him, and most children who aren't his own. It took some therapy to unravel this stuff (therapy for me, that is; he won't go to a therapist because he believes there isn't a therapist smart enough to tell him something he doesn't already know. Or that's what he says. I think the real reason is that he's afraid to hear anything he doesn't already know).

I've made my peace with it, mostly, and I am grateful that he helped make me the kind of woman who could grow beyond the places he decided to stop.