Daddy

A father is available to help his daughter balance both her love and her anger toward her mother, to moderate the inevitable emotional extremes in the intense mother-daughter equation. With Daddy's steadying influence daughters can learn to be comfortable with healthy anger, rather than feeling that they must be eternal good girls who must at all costs conceal it. ~Victoria Secunda

My mother remarried the summer before I started high school to a wonderful man who had a son just ten months younger than me. This one was a bit more of a rushed marriage and we spent a long time afterwards learning about one another.
He would eventually become my confidant and the referee between my mother and I, truly my father.
He was, is, an R.N. and held an officer's title in the Air Force. It wasn't always pretty, this new blended family, but family life isn't always pretty.
During my school years, I fairly considered him to be a nuseance, a bit of an intruder. It would take many years and a war for us to develop that special father-daughter bond. Fathers tend not to want to know about the done-wrongs, wanting to preserve the belief of an innocent child. At times both Bubby and his own son were punished more harshly than I was, occasionally taking the fall for me.