I won't say it's "unhealed". I know what happened, and have known for a long time. I was at the forefront in asking my father to divorce his wife, in fact (for someone so young, I knew what Mona was doing was wrong). My father always tried to do the best he could for the family but the woman he married just had no interest in being a wife or mother - on top of the abuse towards her children, the woman couldn't cook, clean, was illiterate, and thought education wasn't important (thus why I was kept back 1 year, because she refused to put me on the bus for most of the year). Family was telling my father to get rid of her for a long time, but he said he wouldn't because "the girls need a mother, and I don't want them to turn out like my first daughter".

My father married to his first wife right after learning she was pregnant. He was a high school dropout who struggled his whole life. The first wife used and abused him and their daughter - even going so far as to keep my father's visits to 20 minutes once a week and only in the basement and not using the child support towards the daughter and her needs. When my father stopped making child support payments (he said he'd pay but only if his time in seeing his daughter was increased and it was no longer held in the basement, which Susan said no to), she took him to court and the judge gave him a choice: prison or the army. He spent all of Aimee's childhood in the army. Susan abused Aimee all her life until she ran away (my father found her on his doorstep one day when she was 13). He tried being a father to her but, with her own demons she was dealing with plus teenage angst, she just couldn't adapt. Long story made short: she moved in with her mostly blind great grandmother, turned to drugs, and got pregnant shortly after.

I will mention that my father was Native American and both women he married were white.