I thought my cowboy dad struggled with his bisexuality and suffered over it, so I loved him for that

Some of us have mixed feelings about a dad who was an alcoholic and may have even had criminal tendencies as well as bisexual issues, but I always thought my dad was struggling with his severe problems. So this inspired love and compassion for him because of his very difficult life. He could not talk about it. That just wasn't done. He had to suffer in silence. And sometimes I did not think he was going to live to be a very old man, but he fought his alcoholism and lived to the age of 64.
There were many things my dad did well. He knew how to train horses. He knew how to run a ranch. Everything got done at the right time of the year. The water got tended. The ranch produced. He always took pride in his work.
My sisters and I did everything we could to help him to live, because we knew it would be a big loss to our families if he died. We valued and appreciated his strengths. Thanks to him we girls always had financial security. We always knew he would help us out of a bind, and when he died he left us with a considerably larger than usual inheritance.
I felt I had been crippled by all his problems in my youth, so that money was a godsend for me, enabling me to live a more normal life until I became too disabled to work. He made up in his old age for his early years of excess. He took care of his family and helped relieve some of the health problems he had helped cause.
He also tried to keep my mother around because he thought a family should stay together, but his early years of partying had done the relationship too much damage.
He wanted all his daughters to build houses and live on the property he had bought in Arizona. That was the dream he was talking about when he died quite suddenly of a heart attack. I think he thought he might live on and on, so he wanted all his five daughters close by.
I got furious at him when I detected some inappropriate behavior in his attitude toward his grandson. I thought it must have harkened back to the days when the cowboys all camped out in one bed and one tent on the range, but I figured this was how my dad's sexual nature became split. I thought the absolute worst thing that could happen was for him to do anything further along these lines that would so upset and violate my son's trust in him. I called and asked my son when he reached adulthood if he had done anything more than offer to pay him to sleep in the same room with him, and he said no. What he said to me back when my son was only 13 was that he wanted him to sleep in the same bed and that is when I hit the roof! Wouldn't you? I told him my son would not be comfortable with that, so my dad backed off. He could see I had fire in my eye and was suspicious of his motives.
But I think parents can't be suspicious enough when somebody wants to do something that doesn't seem right with their children. I feel if I had been suspicious enough at an earlier time one of my sons would not have been molested by a much older kid in his teens who wanted to join the younger boys in their slumber party. We were on vacation and my little son said the teen liked kids. Oh, my word, if I had just been more suspicious of an older teen that wanted to join a little kids' slumber party! But I wasn't. I could have absolutely denied my permission, but I didn't. I was too soft, too easy. Yet, I felt uneasy. I didn't like the feral look in the kid's eyes when I met him. Shifty-eyed I thought.
I just don't think we can be too careful, too suspicious when it comes to kids. It is a long life and most parents are apt to get careless now and then. And then follows years of regret.
But let us face it, we have many in our society with criminal tendencies. This older kid predator told me he had been violated nightly by a teenager when he was five his mother took into her home and allowed to sleep with him! Those who have been molested extensively as he was, he said this went on for two years, grow up to be pedofiles. We have to accept that people we love and depend on may have had these experiences in their lives and may molest in turn when they are adults, if there is opportunity. Painful as it is, we must face those possibilities to protect our children.
I knew one mother who trusted the kids' grandfather enough to let her children stay with their grandparents. Her oldest daughter finally told her he was molesting them. She was going to have him arrested, and before that could happen he shot himself, but what dreadful pain the family endured when a trusted member of the family could not resist a temptation to cross the line.