Now, that doesn't mean you should just act as if nothing happened. Actions have consequences, and those consequences should be determined by the gravity of the actions.
"Abuse" is a vague term and often people mean very different things by it. Some people call their father throwing a fit of anger or cussing their kids out about something every now and then "abuse". And then other people use the same term to refer to really diabolical stuff, like child-buggering. With the less serious and more understandable stuff, you should also take into consideration what your father was going through at the time, and how that might have influenced his actions and his judgment. When I got older and began to understand what my father has had to deal with (including me lol), it really made me not care at all about some of the rough-ups we had. So I mean whether or not you should want to patch up the relationship with your father should really be determined by the character of the abuse, the extent of it, the circumstances, et cetera. This should also determine what exactly "patching up" that relationship means - like what kinds of boundaries you set, and so on.