I couldn’t decide whether to call this thread “how do I forgive?” “how do I forget?” or “how do I move on?” but the above title seemed the most appropriate.
I’ve hung on the fringes of the Straight Dope for a long time, participating occasionally. I’ve always been amazed and impressed by the advice that is given to people dealing with difficult circumstances. I’m hoping that someone might say something in response to this thread that might help me out. I know in these types of threads that it is important to be as complete and accurate as possible, so I’ll try to set everything down, but it’s kind of long and self-involved.
I am 30 years old, happily married with one son and a daughter on the way. I tend to think of myself as fairly progressive and non-judgmental, but the last few months have caused me to question that.
I am an only child. When I was 19 months old, my father, a military pilot, was killed during training. My mother miscarried what would have been my sister and was understandably devastated. I have no real memory of my (real, birth?) father.
When I was five years old, my mother remarried. She was 31 at the time and married someone who was 40 years old. My mother, (new/step) father (and now I) are all professionals in the same field.
My stepfather has helped raise me since I was five years old. I pretty much consider him to be my father and don’t even use the step- part when I think or speak about him. He has three children from a prior marriage. So, I have two stepsisters 4 and 6 years older than me and a step brother 8 years older. I’m not particularly close to my siblings, since they generally lived with their mother.
My parents had a seemingly ideal marriage. Everybody considered them an ideal couple, both very successful professionally and holding together a family. After about 22 years of marriage, which is shortly after I graduated from grad school and was focused on my own family, my father and mother became more distant. I later learned that they had stopped being intimate entirely.
It turns out that my father had an affair with a co-worker that lasted approximately three or four years before being discovered last fall. My mother was absolutely devastated and is just beginning to come out from it now. My father moved out of their house last November, and divorce proceedings are underway.
My father is continuing the relationship with the woman he had the affair with. She is about ten years younger than my mother (20 years younger than dad) and apparently has a young daughter (not his).
During the separation, my wife and I were in the position of having to hold my mother together emotionally. She was, and still is, in counseling, but we were the ones who tried to help her through the crying and the pain. My father virtually never saw my mother and followed the brilliant strategy of not giving her any information about why he had the affair, when it started, whether he still loved my mother, whether he wanted to reconcile or divorce, etc. Consequently, I feel like I got to deal with all of the trauma that my father’s decision caused, while he got to walk away.
When my mom found out about the affair, I promised that I would try to remain neutral and not take sides. I felt like I owed my father that much and I was unwilling to give up the only father I ever knew. My siblings adopted similar strategies, although they had it significantly easier since they weren’t the ones in the position of holding mom together.
Unfortunately, my father compounded the problem by lying to me about things related to their relationship. I was left wondering whether I could ever trust my own father.
For the last several years, our family had gone down to Mexico for a family vacation (my parents, siblings, their spouses and children, etc.) The vacation was in February or March. My wife and I decided not to go because my wife was five months pregnant, and this part of Mexico is not known as a hotbed of emergency prenatal care. However, my siblings went. Apparently with their consent, my father took his mistress. (I admit the term is perjorative, but it is technically correct in this context.)
This, unsurprisingly, caused a new round of pain, crying and grief for my mother as she was understandably upset that my father had taken another woman to “our” place. I have to admit that I was also shocked that she went and that my siblings apparently approved in advance of this.
After they returned, I sat down with my father for about an hour and explained to him how upset I was and how upset my mom had been. I told him that I was trying not to take sides, but that what he had done was fundamentally WRONG. While marriages may come apart, and people may fall in love with someone else, the appropriate course of behavior is to end one relationship before beginning another. I also told him that while I would forgive him (or at least try to?), that I would never accept the other woman into my life and that she was never to be around my son. My wife feels even more strongly about the last point than I do.
After this, my mother went on an extended vacation with a friend of hers. During the vacation, she seems to have moved on past the crying and is now in an anger/acceptance mode.
But, I am pretty conflicted at this point. I want to continue to have a relationship with my father, but feel I can’t trust him. While I am no saint, the concepts of loyalty, honor, and faithfulness are important to me and I feel like he trampled all over them. I don’t want to walk away from him, but I don’t really want to see or speak to him either.
I feel clearer about my siblings in that I can’t understand how they could be so accepting. I know that their ultimate allegiance would be with dad, as mine would be with mom. But, how could they tolerate, let alone accept, the presence of the woman who has caused this rift? As it stands, I have absolutely zero desire to ever speak with them again. This hurts, as I don’t want to see my children grow up without their cousinsm even in a distant relationship.
So, given this long monologue, does anyone have any words of advice for me? How do I move past this and reconstruct a relationship with my father? Should I try at all? What do I do with my siblings?
On a related note, am I being judgmental about things I have no business judging? One part of me thinks that this should be between Mom and Dad and that I shouldn’t make it about me. Another part says that what he did is fundamentally wrong and that it had severly impacted my life and that it is wishful thinking at best to believe that it is just between Mom and Dad.
And good luck.
