#20 Wife's hubby admits his affair—with her mom / I set it up for my mother and husband to deceive me.
DEAR ABBY: When I was a child I developed a huge crush on "Mickey," a young man who worked for my mother. As I grew older, the crush grew to love. Twenty-six years later, I am still very much in love with him—and we were married two months ago.
Last night, Mickey told me something that's tearing my heart out: He and mother had an affair 18 years ago. I am trying to act as though I'm OK, and promised Mickey I wouldn’t tell Mom that he had confided in me.
Now I honestly don't know if I can keep silent, knowing my husband had sex with my mother. I feel hurt, betrayed, and sick about the news.
I still love Mickey and don't want to end our marriage. He says the affair shouldn't matter because it happened long ago, and I shouldn’t dwell on it -but in my eyes it might as well have been yesterday.
How will I ever face my mother again and not let on that I know? DESPERATELY HURT IN FLORIDA
DEAR DESPERATELY HURT: You were just a child when the romance happened. For your mother’s sake, it would be a kindness not to let her know you have more in common than the usual mother/daughter bond.
Everyone has a skeleton in the closet. If you can let this go, I’d recommend counseling. ABBY
Gabby's Reply:
Hi Desperately Hurt: I’m concerned about your "hurt." I know that you are experiencing mixed emotions but I don’t get pain. What I do get is anguish and confusion and lots of thoughts. I sense you have a barrier to experiencing the pain just as you have had a barrier to experiencing the deceit between you and your loved ones. One appropriate experience would be anger but because you don’t mention anger it's possible you are trying your best to suppress your anger, perhaps even rage, towards the two people you love most in the world. At some level you have tremendous pain. I’m sure part of the "sick" feeling is a gnawing sense that you have yet to realize the significance of all aspects, the various truths, of the matter. Perhaps my feedback will facilitate you in acknowledging what this is really about for you.
Here’s why I don’t get that you are handling the truth yet. You should be devastated to realize that both your mother and her former lover (now your husband) both purposefully and deliberately decided to deceive you. They made a pact (most likely verbally, but definitely nonverbally/implicitly, between them, during your courtship) to keep the truth from you. It's called a conspiracy. In their eyes you are still a child, not yet an adult.
Most everyone who reads this already doesn’t like your husband, and, they don't respect you, in part because of his deception, but also because of your code of ethics. That is to say, because you conned him into conning you to keep silent, to not let your mother know you know, you have turned others (many readers) against him. This doesn't reflect well upon you.
No actualized woman, one who is whole and complete, with a developed sense of self, and of right and wrong, would make a promise such as you did. Most would agree that your husband has compounded his deceit by enrolling you, the one he supposedly loves, into compromising your integrity, asking you to stuff such an unstuffable mind-torturing piece of information. He’s oblivious of the consequences his deceit has had on him and now he unconsciously wants you to compromise your integrity thereby dooming you to the consequences of deceit.
Invalidating your experience, making you wrong for what you think, "… the affair shouldn't matter…" is not love. Of course it matters! I assure you, both your mother and husband are experiencing undesirable consequences daily from their deceit.
It is virtually impossible for you to not communicate what you know to your mother. Even if you try, you will only create a yet another barrier to the experience of communication. Which leads me to the biggie. No matter what you think or believe, you have never ever experienced being in communication with your husband, and, based upon how unconscious you have been I’m sure never with your mother. All of you have been doing your imitation of communication. How do I know? You can’t experience the experience of communication (of love) when there is a withhold (deceit) in the space. In this case your mother and husband conspired to deceive you and you were so unconscious that you could not tell. Then you inspired your husband to enroll you in a conspiracy with him against your mother and again you were so unconscious that you had no choice. Your integrity was/is so out you couldn’t see in a flash that to choose to agree to hide something from your mother is unethical, and to do it at the behest of your husband verges on evil.
You set it up for both him and her to abuse you. You are addicted to abusing and being abused (see abuse).
That you could not tell that those around you were deceiving you does not make you a good candidate for motherhood. Can you spell c_o_n_n_a_b_l_e?
That your husband so easily conned you means he has unacknowledged disrespect towards you. There can be no experience of love in a relationship in which the respect has diminished. One can’t respect someone who's so easily conned. Your con has been to set it up for him to con you, in this way you've made him look sicker than you.
BTW: What you are calling love ain’t it. Yours’ is a concept of love; it’s an emotion. Its foundation is not rock solid. It’s built on deceit. If you’ll look closely you’ll see that you have unacknowledged contempt and resentment for both of them—not because of their sex affair, but for treating you condescendingly and deceitfully. Just because you have been unconscious doesn’t mean the contempt hasn’t been/isn't there. It is "sick"ening to experience invalidation. If you’ll look now you’ll see that you’ve had unexplainable mixed emotions with your husband all along. This is partly because you’ve been having a relationship with someone you don’t know. You married his "honest act." Even he doesn’t know who he is. You haven’t been able to experience his goodness and purity because he has only been acting good and pure and honest and truthful.
That you could be so easily duped by both your mother and your husband says that you are not here and now. You are not living in present time. Your growth has been curtailed by some, as yet unknown, childhood incident. A consultation with a communicologist or therapist will allow you to see what this is all about for you. It's your integrity setting it up for you to get caught (acknowledged) for some childhood perpetration. You are still back at that incomplete communication. For example: Notice that you have adopted your mother’s pattern of deceit. That is to say you are hiding certain things from her and from your husband. Deceivers always attract deceivers; there are no exceptions. That’s what this is all really about for you. It’s a wake up call for you to put in (restore) your integrity.
That your husband made you promise to not tell your mother says you’ve got a serious problem on your hands. I see no future for this relationship in its present form. You will have to take yourself back in time to before you met him, to when you would have chosen to not date a man, who advocates deception. That’s where your character-building growth stopped. Life isn’t going to work for you if you keep empowering deceit in those with whom you relate.
The way to begin handling this is:
1) Tell your husband that he needs to let your mom know he told you about their affair. If says he won't then tell him you will.
2) Then enroll yourself in at least 25 hours of individual (by yourself) therapy.
3) Insist that your husband agree to complete 25 hours of individual therapy. If he refuses, divorce him. He might go but only to keep you not because he’s clear that he’s sick. That's OK. Either way it'll work out perfectly as long as you issue the ultimatum.
4) Once your mom knows you know insist that she agree to complete 25 hours of therapy. If she refuses tell her that you and your husband will not engage in even one more conversation with her until she agrees to do so. If you don't issue her this ultimatum you’ll still be at effect of her deceiving abuse five years from now.
Ignore any of the above advice and you'll be handling abuse and deceit with your husband and mother, and, own children years from now. It's your turn to be the adult.
What's exciting about this is that there is so much more to love than what you have been thinking it to be. It's within your grasp once you clean this mess up.
Show both of them, and your therapist, our communications. Thank you, Gabby