![]() I make my trips back and forth and I'm on the phone with them and I'm trying to be there for them, even in spite of the fact that I'm not present. I've got six kids now – and six grandchildren – and the best thing I can do is to be there for them as much as I can be. Winning back my children's trust wasn't easy. She ended up taking my kids 1,400 miles away from California, where we were, then got married to another guy. She painted this picture of me as a horrible creature, which wasn't the whole story and it was something I felt really awful about. It was only one time, but we had another child after that. My third wife Patti and I had three kids. And Helen, my wife today – I'm so in love with this woman. To me that is more important than the institution of marriage. I remember it with sadness and I've dealt with each of the women in my own way to say, "Forgive me, I'm sorry about this", and three of them at least are among my best friends. I'm sanguine about my frantic days of marriage and divorce and broken marriages: that's finished now. If I could change it I would have changed it but I can't. They were very saddened by what happened to me and I certainly am too, but it's just what happened. My parents were together for 64 years and I'm on my fifth marriage, so they weren't too happy with the situation. But to watch her to go into this dark, dark hole of dementia and Alzheimer's was so painful. She had so much more but ended up being Dad's editor for the books he wrote, so she was just underused and took a lot of her frustration out on the kids, there's no question about that. She ended up getting driven crazy by her kids. She didn't have to work and I think she resented the fact. My mother passed away a year after my father after losing her battle with Alzheimer's disease. No matter how old you get – and I'm 68 – you're still somebody's kid and when I'm feeling desperate now I think of my pop and it's enough for me to think: come on David, buckle up, get your shit together.' He was the kind of guy you just wanted to turn to. I became a UK citizen in 2004 and he passed away in 2009, but we'd been on the phone to each other probably once a week for the last 10 years. But, boy, did we come together at the end. He was the kindest, dearest, most giving man I think I've ever known and I wish in some ways I could begin to approach the kind of depth of faith and belief that he had. My dad was the most important person in my whole life. And I've been kind of running ever since. Then it was like, "Oh shit, now what do we do?" So we ran away. You just didn't talk about sex, you went out and did it yourself … and my girlfriend was pregnant by the time I was 19. Part of the problem with escaping was that a lot of the things that we needed to talk about – you know, sexually, for instance – were taboo. We returned to the US when I was 13 and, apart from a year in Mexico, settled in South Dakota. I went through a stage of rejection but I didn't reject it by saying anything, it was by acting it. ![]() ![]() We were a very, very religious family – we weren't fundamentalists, just very worshipful and gave credit to God for almost everything. The atmosphere was strict when I was growing up but tempered by love.
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