My Family Wants Me to Support My Cheating Brother

When the tragic Gabby Petito case was in full bloom, I was discussing the reaction of the murderer’s , Brian Laundry, parents, with one of my sons.
It was unconscionable and exasperating how they wouldn’t talk to Gabby’s distraught family wanting to know the whereabouts of their daughter, or share any info they might have gotten from Brian with the authorities and even harder to imagine they were never mandated to do so!
My son and I both agreed, beyond any doubt, that if he did harm to another, or I did, we could still share love, but could not and would not protect each other from the consequences of those actions. We would turn each other in.
Doing the right thing is never up for debate and the rules don’t change because it’s your brother, your son, daughter, parents or Uncle Fred.
“Thou shall not cover up crimes and injustices of a family member”
I think it was commandment number 11, but after Moses smashed them for the Idol worships of the Chosen ones, I believe they inadvertently didn’t pick up the crumbled stones that bore #11.
Doing the right thing is always going to be the right choice.
Stand your ground and keep supporting your SIL.
It upsets me to think about how many chumps out there have everyone turn on them, hurting them so deeply they don’t want to live anymore. How many suicides are caused by that?
SUPPORT THE CHUMP, not your cheating lying brother and his cheating lying Ho. You know that’s the right decision and we have your back on that.
Proud of you for being able to make it under such uncomfortable familial pressure.
👍😊🧡

Abandonment????? Are you serious???? Abandonment means that she left for no reason. He obviously gave her a reason through his choice of cheating. He is using abandonment to have the sadz for image management. FW brother is an entitled asshole.
You family is angry? Well tough. That sounds like an ultimatum which is actually a choice. Choose what you feel comfortable with and what is right. Establish boundaries with your family. They don’t like boundaries, well too bad. Boundaries are what you put up and they can respect them or not but don’t let your boundaries be broken.
They don’t like your decision then they should not have asked you to “pick sides”. You have to do what you feel is right for you. If supporting a cheater is not the right choice for you then don’t support the cheater. Your SIL is being abused and he is continuing his sad sausage narrative. Just think of the kids involved. Who is the sane parent here? Sounds like SIL answered the question “is this relationship acceptable to you?”. You have to make that decision as well. Is the relationship of being pressured or guilted into something acceptable to you when your moral compass is telling you something else? No one has the right to cross or break your boundaries and that includes family.
No one can “make” someone cheat. Cheating is a choice (or a bunch of choices). Your FW brother made decisions but you do not have to support his choices.
My STBX made his choices and his family supported him (of course he never told them about Schmoopie). They will find out about her soon enough. I think they may be surprised to find him with a 32 years younger side piece.

Blood may be thicker than water, but blood poisoning will kill you. And dysfunctional family = blood poisoning.

If you want a side to pick, pick the side of TRUTH, HONESTY, INTEGRITY, SANITY, HEALTHY. As was said, your SIL and the children are your family, and they need an ally. Your family’s position is abusing your SIL AND THE CHILDREN!!!

I wish I had a single family member, blood or in-law, like you.

It’s painful that they have all put you in the position of having to choose sides and take care of their feelings so they can Feel Better. That is NOT love, by the way. That is very sick family stuff. Pressuring you to enable and condone what your brother and his OW did and join them in their conspiracy against your SIL (this also means harming those children!!!!) is super messed up.

This is where a very good therapist comes in to help you. PLEASE seek one out. I’ve had a great therapist for many years, and she is just as necessary for my health as my MD and my OB/GYN.

In my own blood family, I am the lone individual in recovery in a sea of alcoholism, violence, codependency, and all the other dysfunctional crap in the shopping cart. I’ve been the little boy in The Emperor’s New Clothes for 37 years.
The most exhausting thing in the world is pretending (Anne Morrow Lindbergh). There is NO benefit to pretending. Only the illusion of benefits.

Your brother’s conduct is a result of what’s gone on in your family. YAY for you for standing up, calling it out, and standing up for your SIL and the children.

I don’t want fake OK. I want genuine OK.
It sounds like that’s what you want too. And you can have that. It’s hard to let family fly around and be mad when you buck the family system, but it’s a very sick system that needs bucking and YOU will be light years better off for it.

Blood is thicker than water but love is thicker than both. You have a good heart and know what to do.
I can imagine what it was like having a sibling like this growing up.

And I concur with the wrongness of marshmallows on sweet potatoes, lol! 🤣
(And yet another awesome CL response on this post.)👍

What’s better than wanting to do the right thing? Doing the right thing! Stand by your nieces/nephews and sister -in-law. It may make all the difference in their trauma recovery. My kids were suicidal after they caught FW cheating on Christmas and he threatened them if they told me. He left soon after, screaming at the kids that he hated every minute of their lives. Our youngest was 10. Not one of their father’s family — their own grandparents and aunts gave one shit. They never called, wrote, visited. They completely turned their backs on us. 26 years of being their dutiful and loving daughter in law and they never spoke to me again. My kids despise all of those horrid people. Cowards. Evil. Don’t be them.

Everyone in ex-FW’s family was supportive and welcoming. Many of them still keep in touch. I cannot describe how important that was in early days when as a Chump I was still questioning whether I was the problem, or I was unworthy. Even family members that are known for cutting people out welcomed me and were super supportive. That was the first time (Thanksgiving) that I truly felt I was a good person and didn’t deserve to be Chumped. All of FW’s lovebombing (aka attempts to avoid consequences) meant nothing. But the support of family that didn’t owe me anything? That was a life line. Treating SiL kindly will mean more to her than you will ever know. Do the right thing. You will not regret it.

Never support cheaters they are adults and they had a choice to speak to they’re spouse like an adult to access marital counseling or file for divorce.

What a crappy situation! Well, your parents managed to at least raise one good kid. I’ve found that maintaining strong boundaries with toxic family members matters, alot. Even with family members who aren’t toxic, per se, but have very different social and cultural beliefs, boundaries are key to a healthy relationships. There’s just some topics that we’ve all agreed to not discuss, period.

Bottom line: your parents are demanding your silence on, and compliance with, absolutely abhorrent behavior. Anytime people are tying to silence you (unless you’re Kanye West or whatever spewing anti-Semite tropes), you should see a giant red flag. Boundaries required.

You ask “What do I do?” Exactly what your heart is telling you to do, and if you parents can’t handle it, take a break from them. A commentor hear made the poignant point that your brother’s children are your blood family. By supporting them you’re honoring family. It’s a shame your parents can’t see that.

Crises can expose the weaknesses in families that might have formerly been glossed over. Typically the fault lines were always there but may not have been flushed out yet. When my middle child developed a chronic illness and developmental delays as a toddler, it blew my extended family and FW’s extended family apart in one big dysfunctional shitstorm.

Thankfully I wasn’t raised by spacklers. I never knew my father’s toxic family since he’d dumped them before I was born. And my mother always kept her brother’s family at arm’s length because she recognized they were entitled “born on third base” jerks. Both my parents were pretty meh about it all and were philosophical about the circumstances, accidents and influences that make people toxic. My mother got along with her brother and kept up appearances for his sake while he was alive but only took his family in small doses at the usual holiday events. Just in case I didn’t quite get the principle, it was illustrated for me at my uncle’s over-the-top memorial. Each of my cousins and a few of their cronies took turns making not-so-subtle cracks about my son’s condition. I figure they were trying to get in as much damage as they could to make up for all the years my parents shrugged them off. They never heard from me or my kids again. My mother said, “Now you know you’re not missing anything.”

But FW, having been raised to be a FW, had no philosophical armature to deal with his family’s reaction to our son’s illness. When his mother made cruel remarks about my son’s condition, refused to spend time with her “defective” grandson and then went on a campaign to isolate us from FW’s extended family and friends circle by blaming Freudian maternal Voodoo for “causing” my son’s illness, FW had an operatic breakdown.

Having been raised to spackle, FW had always spackled his mother’s assholery so had the luxury of being “surprised” when she too it even further which set him up for shock. He’d maintained a relationship with her despite the fact she’d spackled over his being raped by a family friend as a kid. He’d “forgiven” her bad behavior towards every woman he’d dated before me and to me for years. I think she assume that, if an ultimatum was put to FW, he’d choose her over his own family. She was only half wrong since he split the difference. He went NC with his mother and anyone who defended her actions but then quickly launched into an affair with an office doorknob who was a dead ringer for his toxic mommy. The resemblance was pretty amazing. He lost one stumpy-necked, empathy-impaired, blackmailing spackler with a penchant for internalized misogyny and immediately found an exact copy.

Betraying me was also a way of groveling for amnesty from his mother– “See, mommy, I punished that bad lady just like you wanted me to! Who’s a good boy??” It was like he hoped she’d telepathically sense his concessionary punishment of me and break the standoff by at least agreeing to see her grandkids. He didn’t recognize that narcissists don’t “do” disability and blaming me for causing my son’s disability with my “negative thoughts” had just been to give herself an excuse to avoid the “bummer” of contact with a disabled child while still pretending to “care” about the child. That was another way of groveling for amnesty: during the affair, FW began to attack my parenting just as his mother had done… while he himself neglected his kids in preference for binge drinking and bonking strange. She expected him to come crawling back and agree to maintain ties but without his family in tow. I would say he “half” did this. Who’s a good boy???

The moral of the story for me is that spackling spacklers will eventually end up doing terrible things to you because they expect you to eat the same shit sandwiches they always ate and spackle it in your turn. Hey, FW had been “big enough” to forgive his mother for letting him be raped. Why couldn’t I forgive a bit of backstabbing, exposure to STDs, bilking of family assets, neglect of kids and gaslighting? My parents showed that the buck stopped with them. Meanwhile FW became “the buck.” Even in going NC with his dysfunctional mum, he remained completely enmeshed.

There’s a great final line in a poem by Russian poet Yvgeni Yevtushenko that goes, “Never lie to the young. They may not forgive in you what you forgave.” The poem is about how older generations spackled over horrors under Stalin and then were held to account as collaborators in atrocity by subsequent generations. But the same thing easily applies to abusive families. Keep an eye on what people forgive in others.

Shared DNA is overrated.

I have 2 ex SILs. One, who I thought was a true friend, I never heard from at all, ever again. In fact, found texts from her on his phone inviting him and the AP to her new cabin in the woods. Second SIL, came to my house one afternoon and tried to convince me that the best thing was for me and 2 ASD children to leave our home and “move on” and allow STBX to get on with his life (pretty sure he was planning on moving AP in when I left). But what she didn’t know was I had access to all of his texts and emails and knew that STBX, AP, and SIL had met for drinks the night before to plan her visit with me. If I had a SIL who had supported me and my kids, I would have felt so grateful and blessed. Instead, they stuck with their brother and colluded in the abuse. I’ve never agreed with the saying that blood is thicker than water…if any family member is toxic and causes trauma, abuse or pain….they aren’t my family.