You Won't See Any Other Kid Whose Father Cheated Writing This, That's For Sure
An unusual viewpoint.
I don’t remember a whole lot about my father’s affair with another (married) woman, probably because I was too young for the adults in the family to tell us kids very much. We were in the second house I ever lived in, which means I was older than seven.
I remember one weekend afternoon when my father brought this other woman over to see our house and meet our family. She was a student of my father’s (he taught flying lessons). I remember wondering why she came over, as few students of my father’s came to our house.
I also remember my mother did not like her.
Some time later I remember it being discussed between my mother and my grandmother that my dad had some kind of crush on this woman, or she had some kind of crush on him.
I don’t remember being very worried about it. For one thing, I wasn’t that close to my dad — he was hardly ever home — and for another thing, every child thinks their home is the center of the universe.
Of course nothing would ever come of it. He was our dad.
After my father died suddenly in a plane crash when I was twelve, the issue of letters came up again. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but I think this woman wrote a letter to my mother on the occasion of my dad’s death. I remember my mother and my grandmother having an earnest discussion about it. I can’t be sure whether there were other letters or not, but there may have been. I think there were. I was very unclear about how serious the relationship was at the time.
Interestingly enough, after my own emotional affair with a married man, I became very interested in astrology. It turns out that the child’s horoscope comments on the parent’s marriage. Mine said that it was a dutiful marriage, and that great sacrifices had been made in order for the parents to stay together.
Several years ago, after being no-contact with my mother for many years, I became aware that she was spreading very bad lies about me online. She then started posting pathetic-sounding messages on my late husband’s author page on Facebook, not realizing I was of course the person running the page, so we ended up interacting one more time.
Madness and mayhem ensued, as usual. In between all her rantings and ravings, the following came out: This woman and my father had been very serious. They had discussed leaving their marriages for each other, but ultimately my father had backed out, afraid it would upset my kid brother and me too much.
By this time, I had been through an awful lot with my mother and her behavior. Years of research have convinced me she suffers from borderline personality disorder, and most of the histrionic behavior you read about from borderlines, she did the entire time I was growing up. Everything wrong in her life gets blamed on someone else, including the fact that when my father passed away, she was thirty-five years old and neither drove nor had ever handled a checkbook. The only job she had ever held was babysitting in high school.
Twelve-year-old me watched, round-eyed, as my tremulous and tearful mother began the towering and scary processes of learning to handle a checkbook and taking driver’s ed. My grandparents had to mollycoddle her through every step. My grandmother, having given up her license at fifty-something because my grandparents only needed one car after my grandfather retired, even went so far as to take driver’s ed with my mother to help encourage her along.
This was how frightened and underconfident my mother was in handling the most basic daily responsibilities. I’m pretty sure my own underconfident attitude in my young adult life started right about here.
(Fuck knows how I even made it. Wait a minute, I do know. I made it because I knew I had to get out of there, and I did not ever want to return home and need support from her.)
My mother loved to blame my father for all this. He wouldn’t let her drive or have a car; he wouldn’t let her have her own money.
Years later, a job that would have fallen to my father ended up falling to me. My father’s mother’s one remaining sister was growing elderly and unable to live on her own anymore. Complicating this was her one adopted daughter, a special needs child who had never been able to live on her own. In seeing to these relatives’ affairs and getting them into assisted living, I ended up spending a lot of time with them.
Imagine how surprised I was to hear from my great aunt that not only had my father offered to teach my mother how to drive, but my great aunt did, too! It was my mother who always said no.
But then I remembered — my stepfather had offered to help me with driver’s ed in high school by teaching me how to drive his huge work truck. My mother got jealous and snippy that he didn’t ask her. So, he offered to teach her to drive the truck, too. She said no.
Yet I grew up listening to my mother send my father down the river my entire childhood. Oh, how he treated her! He was the reason she was so unhappy!
It even turned out that my father would take sneak trips up to my aunt’s farm in the country when my uncle was still alive, to ask my uncle’s advice about things. My own father’s parents cussed and fought and threw things at each other, and he didn’t rely on them for much.
My aunt told me my father felt as if my mother was a third child and wasn’t much help to him in the marriage. Being the kid my mother piled up with housework on top of all my homework, which in a gifted program was considerable, even though she was a stay-at-home mom, I could see why he had said that.
I also recall my mother saying my father had complained to her that she didn’t grow in the marriage. Well, I could tell you a lot of stories, but she didn’t grow in our relationship, either. Her behavior became so outrageous I had had to cut her off, and I’m sorry to say I’ve never felt any lack on that account.
I grew up hearing my mother’s story of that marriage to the extent I sometimes hated my dad. Now I saw his side of it.
Sometimes I feel very sad thinking of the life my father had — raised by an untreated bipolar mother in a house full of cursing and violence, marrying someone like my mother right out of high school and getting strapped in by two kids, finding a woman who would have been much better for him and having to give her up, and then dying horribly in a plane crash at age thirty-five with both legs broken.
I’m all too painfully aware that this is not the experience of most young people who discover a parent has cheated in their marriage to the other parent. Many accounts exist right here on Medium of the pain and disillusionment children suffer. How awful and confusing it is to know that one parent they love did this to the other parent they love. How icky and uncomfortable it is to have to meet the person their parent cheated with.
People write about how responsible they feel, that this horrible thing happened to their family and they couldn’t do anything about it. How sad and scary it was as a child to watch their brokenhearted parent cry and struggle to survive after their homes broke up.
I’ve never been able to feel like that, not only because the gauzy quality of the information that filtered down to me while the affair was going on protected me from the full truth until I was older, but because I experienced full force my entire life what my father was dealing with. I began reading psychology and self-help at fifteen, trying to understand my mother’s raging emotional storms and figure out what I could do to make the turmoil stop in our family.
All this has given me a perspective much different from what most people grow up with, I think.
Many people remain, at least in part, the same child who grew up being raised by those young parents. They cherish the loving memories of growing up in their home, and the happy times they all had as a family. How loved and safe and secure they felt.
Perhaps because I didn’t have those times — or when I did, they were soon ruined by borderline rages, gossip, and fighting — I don’t have that kind of idyllic childhood life still living inside me, clinging to misty happy memories it would kill me to discover weren’t true.
I already knew they weren’t true, and I knew it pretty damn young.
People don’t want to lose that shining, mystical love from their childhoods. They know they will lose their parents one day, and they want to look back and comfort themselves with the thoughts that it was a happy marriage and a wonderful family, close and warm. That death may steal it from them one day, but they had a good family with good parents who loved each other and were devoted to each other — a strong, invincible family edifice only death could break.
People think they need that from their parents in order to survive.
Well, I never had it, and I can tell you, you don’t need it to survive.
I looked for it all my life, found it once with my husband, lost it when he died not even seven years later, then thought I found it again with some married guy and “needed” it so badly I grieved for seven years.
I survived.
I’m here to tell you: You don’t need it.
Because, here’s the thing. I see life from the perspective of both parents: both the mentally ill parent and the parent who wasn’t mentally ill. Both the parent who was cheated on and the parent who cheated.
In many ways, I took the place of the parent who wasn’t mentally ill. I know only too well what my dad was dealing with.
What if my dad had lived? What if he had really left my mom?
I know how I would have reacted as a child. My mother used my brother and me as emotional support, always running down other family members to us for the way they treated her. I now know other family members probably had their sides of the story I never heard.
But as a child, I was emotionally enmeshed with my mother, saw everything her way, felt her every emotion. I loved horses because she loved horses; red was my favorite color because it was her favorite color. I was in my twenties before I rethought even those small things.
If my dad had left my mom, I would have hated him with a passion for making my mother cry. I felt as she did: It was his job to make her happy.
I would have agreed with everything she said about him after he left just as I did before he died. My mother got me so angry with my father when I was about eleven, I told him I hated him once.
He said, “Really? Do you really hate me?” And I fell into his arms sobbing, because I didn’t, but I didn’t want to betray my mother. And I felt like she wanted me to say it.
So, I get it, I do.
But, get this, as I do:
We are not supposed to remain children.
Our job on this planet is to grow up.
Say my father had lived, and say he really did leave my mother. Really: Just imagine that.
If I had lived my whole life saying that same thing: “I hate you!” Because you were supposed to make Mom happy.
What would I really be saying to my father?
What I would really be saying to my father is this:
I do not care what you are going through. I do not care how this person treats you. I do not care that you never have and never will have a normal marriage, a normal relationship, a normal healthy love with a woman. I do not care that you are stuck in this hellhole for the rest of your life, that you met someone who could really make you happy and you had to suffer the pain of never seeing her again so you could stay and caretake this screaming baby of a crazy person.
I need you to live your entire life that way — I want you to sacrifice your entire life — TO MAKE ME HAPPY.
That’s what that behavior on my part would be saying to my father.
If you can expect that of anyone — anyone — can you truly say that you love that person??
Oh, sure, you might love them with the despairing neediness of a tiny child, a child who needs that parent because the child cannot do anything for itself and needs the parent to take care of it or it might die.
But we don’t remain tiny children who need our parents to take care of us forever.
We are not supposed to need our parents to make us happy forever.
We are supposed to grow up, and assume responsibility for ourselves, and make ourselves happy.
That is what maturity means.
Why must we require a parent, or anyone else we say we love, to make themselves miserable in a marriage, to deny themselves happiness and the sort of normal life we would want for ourselves, for our best friends, for anybody else but our parent — to make us happy?
I don’t want anybody to suffer to make me happy.
Because I know what it is to suffer to make someone else happy. I had to do it for too long at home myself.
Why would I expect my hypothetical living father to stay and make my mother happy, when I could not even do it myself? I’m not kidding, it really was that bad.
Sometimes, folks, it really is that bad.
Sometimes, growing yourself up out of that tender, needy little child who couldn’t survive without his parents, and seeing those parents as people, is the greatest gift you can give both them and yourself.