My marriage broke down last year, just after our 18th wedding anniversary, when my husband discovered my affair with a work colleague. My mother has supported me through the divorce and I’ve stayed with my parents quite a bit.
One day, after telling Mum how awful I felt for having a failed marriage when she and Dad set such a good example (they’ll celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year), she broke down and said she’d had an affair in her 40s with a neighbour and that he was the love of her life. Now she can’t stop talking about this man and I can barely look my father in the eye. Everything I believed in is shattered. How can I tell her that I don’t welcome this revelation?
Isn’t it amazing how everyone becomes a child when in the presence of their parents?
Even though you are a middle-aged woman with your own admitted failures, you are outraged that your mother has expressed fallibility — though her revelation closely echoes your own story.
She is talking to you as one grown-up to another, yet you are running as fast as you can from such parity.
I understand you are genuinely, and rightly, concerned about your father and I’ll come back to that.
Nevertheless, the unconscious subtext of your letter is that it’s your mother’s job to succour you, not yours to offer any support to her.
You need to take into account the fact that you triggered her revelation by lamenting that you hadn’t lived up to your parents’ example. Can’t you see how terrible your mother would have felt that you felt pressured to live up to some golden matrimonial standard when the truth was more complex?
Any honest soul would feel hypocritical portraying themselves as a paragon of virtue when that wasn’t the case. Surely, that was why she blurted out this huge secret after all these years?
One day, after telling Mum how awful I felt for having a failed marriage when she and Dad set such a good example (they’ll celebrate their 50th wedding anniversary next year), she broke down and said she’d had an affair in her 40s with a neighbour and that he was the love of her life. Now she can’t stop talking about this man and I can barely look my father in the eye. Everything I believed in is shattered. How can I tell her that I don’t welcome this revelation?Isn’t it amazing how everyone becomes a child when in the presence of their parents?
Even though you are a middle-aged woman with your own admitted failures, you are outraged that your mother has expressed fallibility — though her revelation closely echoes your own story.
She is talking to you as one grown-up to another, yet you are running as fast as you can from such parity.
I understand you are genuinely, and rightly, concerned about your father and I’ll come back to that.Nevertheless, the unconscious subtext of your letter is that it’s your mother’s job to succour you, not yours to offer any support to her.
You need to take into account the fact that you triggered her revelation by lamenting that you hadn’t lived up to your parents’ example. Can’t you see how terrible your mother would have felt that you felt pressured to live up to some golden matrimonial standard when the truth was more complex?
Any honest soul would feel hypocritical portraying themselves as a paragon of virtue when that wasn’t the case. Surely, that was why she blurted out this huge secret after all these years?
