I Made My Daughter Visit Her Misogynistic Grandfather
She didn't want to go. I took her anyway. I'm still not sure I was right.
“Oh my god, Dana, it’s you,” my dad gasps in his excited-yet-blunted tone, an affect I’ve grown accustomed to in the four years since we moved him into memory care.
He’s thrilled to see me. I live across the country so my visits are rare. After a lifetime of his angry outbursts, I’m happy for his childlike wonder at the sight of me.
“Hi Dad,” I reply. “Yep, it’s me — and I’ve brought some visitors,” I say, nudging my two teen daughters forward. They don’t share my ease. My eldest, in particular, looks pained as she reluctantly makes her way into his line-of-sight. “Hi Grandpa,” she mutters, her usual charming and articulate self suddenly smaller.
He extends his arms to her, hands tremoring, asking for hugs I never insist my daughters give. They each reluctantly and guardedly lean in, and then retreat. Smart.
My father isn’t dangerous, especially now that he’s feeble and has dementia. But still.
It’s best to keep a wide berth.
This is my second and final visit to see my dad this trip. I typically try to get to Florida at least twice a year, and see him 2–3 times per visit, for 1–2 hours per visit. So give or take, I spend maybe eight hours per year with him — a full work day. And that’s plenty.
My relationship with my father has long been fraught. He’s easier these days, with dementia pulling back the veil on his bullying and bombast to reveal the sad, scared little boy underneath. Plus I’m 55 years old; I’ve lived outside my dad’s home for three times longer than I was trapped under a roof with his unmanaged anger.
Even before his dementia, our visits were infrequent and short. It’s easy to let the reasons why blur with time. There was misogyny and racism, angry outbursts and inappropriate comments galore. There were moments, incidents when I thought: this could be it. He’s said enough to cut him off entirely.
But I never did. In the end, it was easier to just continue to know him, but barely—at arm’s length, if my arms spanned the entire United States. He’s my father. I care enough to ensure he’s cared for. From a distance.
My first visit this trip happened a couple days earlier, alone. No need to put my girls through a grandpa visit twice.
I sat next to my dad at breakfast, his new roommate Stan* seated across from us. Stan is new since my last visit and lower-functioning than most residents on this unit — wheelchair-bound, largely nonverbal, communicating mostly in grunts and groans, with strands of sticky spittle trailing from his lips. Still, basic dignity is a must, so I say hello. “Hi, I’m Dana,” I enunciate clearly and with a smile. “I’m Mitch’s daughter.”
I get a blank stare back, a bit of a groan but it appears more reflexive than directed at me. So I turn back to my dad.
Dad’s locked-in on his meal. He’s supposed to be on an 1,800-calorie daily diet, but it looks like he’ll exceed that on breakfast alone: eggs, sausage, bacon, pastry, fruit. I make a mental note to mention it to his doctor.
A verbal outburst from our table mate jolts me from my musings. I think I hear the word “melon.” Startled to hear him speak an actual word, I wonder at first if he’s hungry and coveting my dad’s immoderate breakfast. But, no. I look his way and he shout-grunts in my direction. “BIG MELONS!!”
This inarticulate — and until this moment, non-articulate — hull of a human has roared to life. To sexually harass me. In front of my father.
Who is oblivious.
“BIG MELONS!! BIG MELONS!!” Stan chants.
My hackles raise and I stare him down. “What did you say?” I ask. I can see his eyes aren’t vacuous; he’s fully aware what he’s saying to me. And he’s glancing at my dad to see if the other man in the room noticed and wants to chime in.
My dad is too busy gnawing on his sausage to notice.
What would he have done had he noticed, I wonder? My dad has long been king of the inappropriate comments. I’m grateful he didn’t, so I don’t have to consider his reaction, only my own. I nearly pop off on Stan, but then I see the spittle line from Stan’s mouth break in two and a blob hit the table with a silent plop and I sigh. I’m not going to teach him anything by berating him.
So I ignore him.
Instead, I ponder how there’s another truth I don’t love admitting: men like my father don’t just live in our family history. They create a kind of weather system around them. Other men seem to sense it and lean into the atmosphere — the same casual sexual commentary, the same reflexive reduction — until suddenly women find ourselves standing in the middle of a misogyny storm we didn’t start but somehow recognize.
As a GenX woman, my instinct has often been to avoid rather than confront, to manage the weather instead of insisting it change — the strategy many of us were taught. Who among us can change the weather? But in the era of Trump and Epstein, I find myself wondering whether that stance is strong enough. It’s worked, more or less, for me. But is it strong enough now for my daughters?
I can’t be certain.
My dad finishes his meal and his aide and I wipe him up. His table mate watches us leave, his vocalizations returning to grunts, not words.
My propensity to avoid has long been with me, even in childhood.
I’ve mostly got flashbulb memories, combined with an overwhelming sense of weight and lament about my father. The way he’d ogle any woman in sight. The time I introduced him to my college boyfriend and he asked him, in front of me, why he wasn’t “playing the field.” The countless times he yelled at me, or others around me, to shut up. It’s only now, in my mid-to-late adulthood, that I can finally call it what it was: abuse. My dad was verbally abusive.
My childhood with him unquestionably left me smaller, meeker, quelled. It also instilled in me a lifelong aversion to type-A, overbearing men. I only wanted — want — men who remind me nothing of my father. The slimmer, the gentler, the better. Bring me your betas. Frankly, the fact that I’m interested in men at all feels like proof that sexuality is hard-coded. Nothing else explains it.
As a result, my daughters have a wonderful dad. We’ve raised them without religion, sports, or any form of body shaming.
They’ve known the loving, healthy approval of their father their whole lives. In choosing the opposite of my father as a spouse, my daughters can’t relate to this part of me. It’s as it should be. And perhaps too, it’s created blind spots for me as a mom.
Or perhaps it’s created an opportunity for me to build resilience in my teen daughters?
I can’t say for sure. I can only relay.
We saved our family visit to the memory care for our final day of vacation. I noticed my eldest’s mood shift a full day before. She grew quiet, aloof, even a bit hostile. “Are you okay?” I asked her. “I’m anxious,” she barked at me.
“About seeing Grandpa?” I asked, confused.
She gave her signature exasperated eyeroll-nod, a sophisticated move perfected by teens to show both disdain and affirmation simultaneously.
Why was she anxious? She’d never enjoyed these visits before, but never had any reason to worry about them.
I knew the magnitude of all my father had been. Very little of that man remains. My daughters mostly know of his outbursts through secondhand storytelling from me — and from a smattering of one-off remarks made during his infrequent visits.
Like the time my eldest was in kindergarten when my dad came to visit. She was five, gap-toothed and earnest, still in that expansive stage of childhood where the world is wide and love is abundant.
“You’re very pretty,” he told her immediately. “Who are you going to marry when you grow up?”
She answered with the logic of a five-year-old who hadn’t yet learned the rules. “I’m gonna marry Carlos and Ellie and Kelly and Sam.”
“Carlos??” he replied disdainfully, his casual xenophobia before anything else. But then the rest of the calculation kicked in. “You can’t marry Ellie or Kelly.”
“Well, in Washington State, she can.” I retorted. We’d passed marriage equality before almost anyone else. “The only thing she can’t do is marry all four of them at the same time. But maybe her generation will fix that.”
I kept my tone light, but made my point. His biases had no place in my home or in front of my daughters.
And then there was the California trip.
A year later, we all gathered at a resort in San Diego to celebrate Dad’s 70th birthday. My daughters were six and four, two small girls in sundresses running through the California sunshine. My dad walked up to them, beaming.
“You’re both so pretty,” he said, as he always did.
And then, as naturally as if he were asking about the weather: “When you’re older, are you two going to share boyfriends with each other?”
Anyone else in the world and we would have been out of there.
But it was my dad, and it was his milestone birthday weekend.
“Dad,” I cut in sharply, half-laughing with incredulity, “what kind of question is that?” My tone was controlled. Inside though? I was both enraged and amused. It was just so absurd — and yet, so him, completely consistent with the only way my father has ever known how to talk to women or girls. So I let the comment pass.
But also, I made one thing absolutely certain that entire weekend: I never left him alone with my daughters. I know not all abuse is physical. I planned to limit the scope of his impact, even in the short weekend.
I didn’t want them bearing the unfiltered version of him alone. Not ever.
So I watch my eldest this trip with both concern and an eye roll, as she tries to wiggle out of this visit. Is this legit anxiety? Did something happen to her — either with my dad, or in her life — to make this trip hit harder, emotionally? I try to probe with questions but she’s unreachable. So I’m forced to conclude: she’s just pushing for a hall pass. I don’t intend to give it.
It’s one hour out of a weeklong vacation in sunny paradise, to show up for her grandfather who is flawed but also, is family. Seems like an hour of repetitive small talk is a small price of admission. I find myself more irritated by her attitude than empathetic.
Girl, this is my trauma, not yours. Suck it up and show up, buttercup.
So we showed up. My dad was elated to have not only his daughter but also his two granddaughters to show off. “You two are so beautiful!” he exclaimed. Over and over and over.
Dementia patients perseverate. I knew that. What I hadn’t steeled myself for was how his particular loop would sound on repeat.
My eldest child cowered behind her large purse, crossing her arms, doing anything to disappear from his ever-forgetful and ever-admiring stare.
“You could be a model!” he exclaimed to her, again and again.
I know he intended it as a compliment. I know he couldn’t recall he’d already said it. And still. We were reminded — pounded with the reminder, really — that all he saw was their physicality. Their beauty. And lightly veiled, their sexuality.
Both of my daughters are beautiful, especially to my mama eyes. But they’re beautiful in ways that transcend their looks because I know the whole of them: their wit, their empathy, their talents.
My eldest really is stunning. She spends an inordinate amount of time and effort on skincare, makeup, and hair. My younger daughter is petite, more childlike, with little makeup and even less concern for her appearance.
But a model? I mean, probably not. And also, she’s never aspired to be one. It’s only a compliment if one sees “model” as a desired state.
He says it again. She’s looking down, hunched over.
“You’re beautiful! You could be a model!!”
She’s holding her purse in front of her chest.
And again.
“Oh my god, you’re so beautiful! You could be a model!”
And again.
I watch as my child shrinks into herself.
I want to interject, to interrupt and ask him to stop. But how can he stop something he doesn’t recall he’s done? I pull up photos of our pets to redirect him. Then their art projects. My house. I tell him stories from decades ago. Anything to stop the cycle.
It doesn’t really help. It just slows him down.
I try to make eye contact with them both. My youngest is smiling, apparently fine, unbothered by not being cast as the model. We’re sharing in the cringe, and it’s a bonding moment.
My eldest is not smiling. She’s wincing, pained and affronted — not just at her grandfather, but at me, possibly at the world. She’s not sharing this moment with me, but she’s certainly cringing.
I’ve always tried to protect my kids when needed. And also, an hour of “you’re so beautiful” on repeat in a memory care is a price of admission I’m willing to pay, to ask them to pay. But I’m not them. Do I owe them protection from this? Or do I owe them the lesson of showing up for their elders, even if it’s difficult?
I want to teach them when it’s important to do hard things. Vacation — like life — isn’t just sandy beaches, warm pools, and decadent dinners out on Delray Beach.
Am I teaching her a lesson?
Or is my miserable daughter trying to teach me one?
Most of my life I treated comments like my father’s as something to endure, not challenge. It was the weather; you dressed for it. But endurance has a cost I didn’t fully calculate until I watched my daughter shrink behind her purse: how often does endurance quietly become permission?
My daughters are coming of age in the Epstein era, watching powerful men surface in those files again and again while facing almost no consequences. Watching their own rights erode in real time. The accommodations my generation made, the ones that felt like pragmatism, may look to them like complicity. I’m not sure they’re wrong.
I was raised to dress for the weather. My daughters may decide they’re done bundling up. They may want to move to a different climate altogether.
What I do know: for me, I need to pay my respects and visit my dad, for whatever hours he has left. My moral code demands it. But my eldest turned eighteen this year. The call is already hers.
And I will need to accept that
The next morning, bleary at the crack of dawn, I want to find my way back to them — to check in, to joke, to be a united front again. One of the hardest parts of parenting through yesterday was that we didn’t experience those moments together. I was lumped in with my dad on the wrong side of it all, at least in my eldest’s eyes. We weren’t a united front of smirk. She was aggrieved. And I was the aggriever alongside my father.
We make our way through the airport. TSA pulls my younger child’s backpack aside and checks inside at her sketchbook, her journal. We all exchange knowing looks and giggle — what security breach did they expect to find in a teenager’s journal? They let us through. We order Starbucks. We find our gate and plunk down with our phones.
My eldest reaches for her hairbrush and looks in a mirror. “I look cracked,” she laughs.
I look at her and smile. “Hey has anyone ever told you, you look like…”
“Don’t!” she says, but this time it’s with humor, a shared chuckle. Enough time has passed in the past eighteen hours. It’s funny now.
“…a model?”
“Oh yeah? Nice big melons you’ve got there.”
“Ooof. Fair,” I respond.
She shakes her head, fixes her bangs, and we all put on headphones and await our flight back home, together.
And maybe that’s the only way any of this works: we survive the cringe, make the joke, board the plane, and keep trying to raise girls who know the difference between a compliment and a reduction.
*Name changed for privacy.
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Greetings!
I’m Dana DuBois, a memoirist and GenX word nerd living in the Pacific Northwest—and founder of I Write Out Loud and co-host of The Daily Whatever Show. I write across a variety of topics but parenting, music and pop culture, dating and relationships, and feminism are my favorites. Em-dashes, Oxford commas, and well-placed semi-colons make my heart happy.
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I raised my girls to respect elders, but at the same time if an elder made them uncomfortable in any way, they could step away and I would support them immediately. No kisses, no hugs, no pats on the head without their permission. Empower them to always listen to their "intuition" and to say no forcefully but respectfully and no "secrets" from Mum- if asked to do so consider the request as danger.
Dressing for the weather is nothing to be ashamed of, it was survival. You have given your daughters a better chance. Without relatively small moments of discomfort like that visit, can they really understand what is at stake?