Staying in a Bad Marriage for the Children
A child of a chump writes in to say that staying in a bad marriage for the children does generational harm.
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Hi Chump Lady,
Am not a chump myself (thank goodness), but grew up in the shadow of a truly bad marriage scarred by my dad’s multiple affairs/ financial instability/ checking out. I’ve found your perspective very, very helpful in making sense of things.
My mother has always claimed that “she knew that if she threw him out, that he would be irresponsible and not pay the child support.”
That would be easy for him to do because he worked contract to contract, with no regular job. Years later, when he did cross a line (drinking), they divorced. And guess what? His work was erratic and he didn’t pay the child support.
Here is the problem.
My mom’s total focus on financial solvency led her to ignore, or to at least accept, a lot of psychological abuse (never physical, but psychological abuse nonetheless) against her, and against us kids.
Imagine being told, as an adolescent girl, every night over dinner how ugly and stupid you are, when you used to be so cute and smart.
I know I should just get over this, but I’m still stunned that she didn’t protect us from this disrespect and abuse.
She couldn’t really take us back to her parents (they were deeply dysfunctional), and my dad’s local family did nothing but make excuses for him.
Your mantra that FWs are the way they are because they’re entitled, cowardly and weak very much rings true. Could you please write a column on how accepting this kind of FW-ery for the sake of the children and financial reasons rings down the generations?
Thanks,
Daughter of a Chump
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Dear Daughter of a Chump,
I think you just wrote the column, so I’m running it. But here’s a hearty Amen!
I’ve written extensively about why staying in a bad marriage with a cheater For The Children is a terrible idea. But the cultural forces are against me on this. Still. To this day. And a generation ago, they were very much against your mother. So, if it were me, I’d focus on the fact that SHE LEFT while you were still young enough to need child support.
She finally left him.
Celebrate that. Admire her. A lot of women, especially in those older generations, never left. I’m not totally absolving your mother from not protecting you. But I fear that we’re too quick to look at staying with a FW through the lens of personal moral failure instead of examining the societal forces that kept her stuck. And, frankly, still keep women stuck.
An aside — men chumps, I hear you. Women cheat too and men also stay in bad marriages for the children. But today we’re looking at the heteronormative gender dynamics of why women stay, and patriarchy is a huge problem. (Yes, I wrote heteronormative and patriarchy before breakfast. Have more coffee.)
You don’t say how old you or your mom are, but let’s start with the financial obstacles. I’ve written about my Aunt Joy (The Walls in Your House Will Sing). She couldn’t get a divorce in the 1970s because she couldn’t get credit. It wasn’t until her male boss co-signed a loan that she could pay for a legal retainer and divorce her cheating, alcoholic husband. In the United States, by law women couldn’t get credit in their own name until 1974. And consider that a woman of your mother’s generation most likely didn’t know any woman who had financial autonomy or access to credit. Their mothers and grandmothers weren’t in the work force, or taking bank loans either. Generations of financial illiteracy. I’m not saying there weren’t exceptions, but the entire SYSTEM kept women out of the workforce. (Women’s earnings were derisively called “pin money“)
She couldn’t really take us back to her parents (they were deeply dysfunctional)
So, your mother’s mother was in a bad marriage too? Same forces at play. Your mother had no role models, no family support, and yet she still eventually left.
It’s so important to set a good example.
Your mother showed it could be done. And the more women who leave, and raise children as solo parents, and stay in the workforce, and enjoy financial autonomy the easier it is for the next chump. There’s an EXAMPLE out there. It also makes it harder to believe in all the bogeymen used to keep women stuck. You’re a loser. Your child will grow up to be a criminal. You don’t have an “intact” family.
Every person who sane parents and survives leaving a FW is a rebuke to those narratives.
Am not a chump myself (thank goodness), but grew up in the shadow of a truly bad marriage scarred by my dad’s multiple affairs/ financial instability/ checking out.
You’re not a chump yourself. You had a good example — a mother who left. And a bad example — a FW for a father. You broke the generational FW dynamic link. Not that we knowingly become chumps, but having good boundaries and knowing what you will NOT tolerate can shut this shit down before anyone gets too invested.
My mother has always claimed that “she knew that if she threw him out, that he would be irresponsible and not pay the child support.”
Men still don’t pay child support. (Ask me how I know.) There’s yet one more SYSTEMIC barrier to keeping women stuck. Less than half of parents receive the full child support they are owed according to the most recent U.S. Census. There are billions (with a B) in arrearages. If you default on your car, the repo man shows up. If you default on your child, no one shows up. It’s up to you to collect and good luck.
Your mother’s fears were not unfounded.
And yet she left eventually anyway.
grew up in the shadow of a truly bad marriage scarred by my dad’s multiple affairs/ financial instability/ checking out.
What you’re describing is domestic terrorism. She needs this man, she’s deeply invested in this man. The larger world doesn’t have a lot of good examples of single mothers, or policies in place to help them and their children, like workplace child care or family leave. Add in a whole victim-blaming narrative that you’re a loser if you divorce or parent a child alone. Then there’s the internalized misogyny of “I’m nothing if I’m not coupled.”
Now, consider your FW father. A man who does everything in his power to make your mother feel off base and unsafe. She cannot count on him to provide, or be faithful. But she probably feels like she should, because he’s told her it’s her fault he’s this way. And if she’d just be more understanding or a better wife appliance he wouldn’t have to do the Bad Things.
His multiple affairs telegraph that she could be replaced at any time. TRY HARDER TO WIN HIM. His financial instability makes her more and more vulnerable. And this whole chaotic mess is exhausting. Which is its own force keeping her stuck.
And there’s no one else to help.
She couldn’t really take us back to her parents (they were deeply dysfunctional), and my dad’s local family did nothing but make excuses for him.
So in the midst of this exhaustion and dysfunction, she’s supposed to forge her own support system of friends and allies. When most of her energies are set at basic survival.
And still she left.
My mom’s total focus on financial solvency led her to ignore, or to at least accept, a lot of psychological abuse (never physical, but psychological abuse nonetheless) against her, and against us kids.
She didn’t know she could do it until she did it. Her financial solvency fears were not unfounded. She was doing what generations of women did before her — stay and bear it. And she did what the wider cultural norms were telling her to do — be a Good Wife and Mother and Stay. Because #patriarchy.
Daughter, I wish you had the kind of protective mama bear grizzly we all deserve. Who would set upon her own husband if he hurt her child. Who knew her worth. I’m sorry she didn’t leave sooner.
Imagine being told, as an adolescent girl, every night over dinner how ugly and stupid you are, when you used to be so cute and smart.
The ugly stupid person here is your father, projecting. He needs very badly for you all to believe that you’re the problem, not him, because he needs his wife appliance and front of normalcy. And what are you supposed to do with your ugly stupidness? Try harder to go back to being the Cute Smart girl you used to be. Gosh, you have the potential! Pick me dance harder. He’s got the power and you’re all supplicants to his judgements on your worth.
I’m sorry your mother didn’t save you. She’d probably internalized those “I suck” messages herself.
I know I should just get over this, but I’m still stunned that she didn’t protect us from this disrespect and abuse.
Go forward knowing that you can protect yourself from disrespect and abuse. No one determines your worth except you. Eventually, your mom decided your father’s behavior was unacceptable and she left. Please eject your father from your head the way your mother ejected him from her life.
I can understand feeling distraught that your mother didn’t protect you from your father’s psychological abuse, but I don’t understand feeling stunned. Stunned would mean that she was doing something far outside the norm, like there was a whole world out there of uppity women standing up to abusive men and not taking it. She really was an outlier for leaving him.
Most of us don’t get the parents we wish we had. But you got a mother who corrected course and set a good example by divorcing an abusive drunk. And she did it without emotional or financial support. That’s pretty damn mighty. I hope you find comfort there.
Struggling with this dynamic is completely normal and is part of the whole restructuring after your parents split. Some of the parameters are more difficult than others.
My kids were in college after my ex left, and they lived with me the whole time. And it took years for the three of us to work through it and come to a good place. We all had therapy at different times, and I joined a twelve-step group because I realized that I very much enabled their addict, abusive dad.
I stayed out of fear of split custody, and my fears were very justified. One of my kids was secretly thinking of running away, fearing the same thing, as they saw the marriage faltering.
So I made formal amends with them during the divorce process, owning up to not protecting them and at times, really ignoring them because my ex was so demanding of my attention. Maybe I should have pulled the plug earlier, but I didn’t. Now we had to make the best of where we were.
Now we’re truly good. The divorce was a mess and very hard on me, but thankfully no custody issues.
I recently read Melinda French Gates’s book “The Next Day”. Highly recommended, no dishing about FWs but about navigating life’s transitions. She shared a poem by a poet, who writes under the MAIA, that resonated with me and came to mind while reading CL’s more sympathetic perspective of a woman who failed her child. This short poem is also “heterativenormative” and from the female perspective, but I think it can apply to all humans.
i hope
when you come home to yourself
there are flowers lining the front porch
that were left from all the women
you were before.
This poem brought tears to my eyes. My senses of relief and freedom when I come home to no FW are palpable. I can see all of those flowers; I feel like they represent me forgiving myself for my mistakes and not being braver to get out sooner. But I did get out — D-day provided my exit ticket, the clear line of what for me is not acceptable in a marriage. All of the mind-fuckery before that was hard to prove, the evidence somewhat circumstantial and mostly confined to my orbit with FW, which is what kept me stuck.
I also read Melinda French Gates’s book. It came across as vague, probably because she didn’t want to be seen as dishing the dirt. Lyz Lenz’s This American Ex-Wife: How I Ended My Marriage and Started My Life is way more Chump Lady-ish. Highly recommend.
It’s also possible that she secretly signed an NDA in order to get a good divorce settlement.
Thanks, Eve. I will check out that book. I agree that the book was vague, but I did like hearing her perspective on transitions in general. It’s been more than a decade since my own sorry drama of trying to make nice with a FW so I wasn’t looking for practical advice. And, of course, her life is very different from most of us chumps.
correction – the name MAIA
I had the opposite perspective. I saw my mother’s multiple divorces as failures. I see now that her leaving these men as an uneducated woman with small children was brave.
I thought that I had built a successful marriage. When my time came to leave as an uneducated woman with small children, fear overwhelmed me and I stayed. It was the same fear that she faced, fought, and overcame.
I understand now that she didn’t fail. I did.
I feel this.
Even though overall I successfully navigated my way through The Big Mess, when it comes to not leaving when I should have, I feel like I failed. I had saved money and even gone to look at an apartment close enough to my work to walk…but I never left.
For all Chumps who feel this way, I get you. I stayed many times when I should have escaped – worse, I saw the red banners before marriage and went through with it anyway. I’m learning to be compassionate with myself about my bad life decisions; I did the best I could do at that time. For as much time as we spend examining and regretting the past, we should spend double that amount of time living the now and planning our futures. The now and the future are all we have that is real. Make a list of what you learned, commit to absorbing those lessons down to your marrow, and live a purposeful and joyful life.
Staying was NEVER an option for me! I had already begun planning my escape when I unexpectedly became pregnant after he drunkenly forced himself on me. By then, I knew it was better to not resist.
it took a while to hoard what I thought was enough money to escape. I left with an 11 month old when he was in jail overnight for domestic abuse. Best thing I could have done! Yes, we struggled financially but we survived.
Never forget. You are stronger than you think.
i moved in a hurry with the help of a couple of friends. A co-worker who I did not know very well watched my baby. Unbeknownst to me, she sent her bother and his friends over to help me move. What a blessing in disguise. I was moved in under 3 hours. There are good people in the world!
“I was moved in under 3 hours. There are good people in the world!”
That is incredible. How awesome of your friends, and this brother and his friends! For all the FWittery we see described on this page, there are good people out there still.
What an inspiring story. Thank you for telling it.
My Cheater’s parenting ran a wide swath from decent and reliable to abusive and absentee and many times I considered leaving but my parents were literally worse. I knew if I left, in order to work, I would have to put my little kids into childcare systems that were unreliable and expensive.
Eventually, Cheaters absence during the cheating created a quieter, safer home for us. After his death, the kids all seemed to process their experiences by focusing on the times when the cup was half full rather than half empty. While that prevented us all having the sort of experience this writer describes, I am left feeling like they completely ignore the abuse he used on me. Im expected to stay silent on it in their presence.
Intergenerational fuckedupness can have so many bad results but every once in a while you can tweak it to a good outcome…
My dreadful parents were horrible to my oldest son since before he was born for no good reason (but one really stupid one as they didnt like his name). The parents caused havoc on the regular as did my son – I was truly in the sandwich generation of needy parents and needy kids.
As the parents’ finances were always a mess, I expected nothing in the form of inheritance so it was a surprise when there was something left over after their estate was recently settled.
As my parents always disliked my oldest kid, I decided that I could annoy them all the way to the afterworld if I used the last of their money to pay off the huge child support arrears my son had hanging over his head (a result of bad decisions compounded by dreadful events beyond his control. He had gotten his shit together enough to make proper monthly payments but the arrears was insurmountable.
No grandchild of mine would be raised with our family not making good on what was owed to him and his mother. It felt like a giant karmic connect-the-dots.
I understand that it’s not my kids job to coach/support me in processing my abuse. The kinds of acknowledgement I wish I had from them would be significantly less than that. Please know I have accepted this fact and I do not actively seek any discussions on this topic.
It’s not their job, but I do believe that once they are adults, it is their responsibility as human beings to acknowledge the truth of what he did to you and be supportive, not expect you to remain silent about it so they can stay in denial.
I feel for you UNM.
I agree. Or else the subconscious lessons learned is to ignore or accept abuse!
My kids also (youngest 30 when D-Day) do NOT want to talk about their father in any form, and strictly speaking he was not abusive to them at all. They just don’t want to be in the middle of my and/or his emotional junk. Perfectly reasonable.
Avoiding the issue never works in the long run IMHO
I understand this mom. Over and over, I would look for apartments, even though there was probably no way I could afford the first/last month + security deposit, because he sure did his damndest to make sure I was financially on fumes all the time. I couldn’t even squirrel away money, because after paying the mortgage, the groceries, the electric bill, etc from my own pay, there was just nothing left.
He always had an excuse why he couldn’t pay for anything. In the moment, I accepted it because it was either that or lose the house.
It took me 12 years to finally get out. And now, 6 years later, my child still resents the divorce. FW convinced them that I “threw him out”, even though the truth was he moved in with one of the many, many APs. He married that one, had another kid, and of course, cheated on her. She is SHOCKED, SHOCKED I tell you, and now spends her time being awful to FW and my kid.
But even that is “my fault”, because if I hadn’t “thrown him out”, FW wouldn’t be with this toxic woman. My kid has been in therapy, but still hasn’t addressed his resentment towards my part in “ruining” the family.
I haven’t told them the truth, that Daddy Dearest had cheated on me with at least 14 other women. That Daddy Dearest is the one who doesn’t talk to his own family by HIS choice. That Daddy Dearest stole thousands of dollars from me, to pay for online psychics, trips and treasures for the various APs. I don’t know that I ever will, because I don’t know if they will ever believe things were that bad.
I should have gotten out when my kid was little. That is my biggest regret. But know, like me, your mom did everything she could to figure out how to get out, and finally did so. Give her grace, because even now, it is horrifically difficult to make it on your own with limited financial means.
Please tell your kid the truth
My X left as soon as my daughter was born. The next 38 years my X turned his affair into my fault and my daughter has taken his side. When I talk to my daughter and share some stories..she defends her father. I’ve adjudged but know you still have to take care of your body and soul no matter the outcome
2x, I’m so sorry. You’re in pain, your X is cool. That makes him the winner. Your daughter wants to win the love of the winner. Or loser. Has she spent her life trying to make losers love her?
Phoenix, why haven’t you told your child, not for sympathy, but so that they have the full picture, that their father cheated with at least 14 other women and stole money? They may not have the information they need to process their resentment, if they don’t know the truth and see their father as relatively blameless.
They know their dad cheated on me with the AP.
But what good is it going to do anyone to try to convince my kid about everything else? FW will just gaslight them like he gaslit me, and I will come across as a lying lunatic.
Every professional I had to deal with (FW tried suing me for custody, that was a treat) would look at me like I was insane when I first told them what was going on. It was only after providing evidence, repeatedly, did it sink in. I am talking family therapists, the GAL that got assigned to my kid. The GAL literally laughed at me and said, “Are you accusing your ex of coaching your kid??”, which, he was. It was only after finding a series of text messages on my phone where FW was giving my kid a script of what to say to both the therapist and the GAL that the GAL finally understood that yes, FW was doing EXACTLY what I reported.
The story is so ridiculous that no one believes it. At least at first.
When my kid has finally been discarded by FW, which will happen eventually, we can start those conversations.
IMHE with the family court system GALs are F***ING useless. One could not even get my name right. Another kept confusing us with another divorcing couple. A third (!!) was more interested in his traditional family heritage values than our situation.
Short answer: If you try to divorce in Alameda County, California, DO NOT use a GAL.
That sucks that people didn’t believe you. How brutal that his behaviour is so bad that just naming it gives people the impression that you’re exaggerating. It sounds like you’re playing the long game, and just being the sane parent. Stay mighty!
Thank you, I am trying!!!
Dear Daughter of a Chump:
Your Mom’s worries about financial solvency may have been entirely founded. She may have been worried about keeping a roof over the heads of her children or putting nutritious food on the table. In other words, it may have been about survival. And she did leave when your father’s addiction to alcohol reached a certain point of terribleness, and then everything she thought about his irresponsibility came true.
My mother married a man she was not in love with in order that her children have what they needed. As a teenager I judged her very harshly for that. Now I understand why she did what she did. Women (parents) will pretty much do whatever they feel they have to in order to take care of their children, and the fierce love behind that should be celebrated.
I wish my Mom were still alive so I tell her that.
Daughter, it sounds like your mom saw the psychological abuse and cheating as the price she, and her children, had to pay in order to keep a roof over your heads and food on the table. I imagine he was demoralizing her as well as you, perhaps to the point that she felt helpless to change anything, especially given her lack of family and societal support.
You don’t know what happened behind closed doors and she may also have feared that if she filed, he’d escalate his abuse of her by retaliating against the children. She was correct that he wouldn’t pay child support.
Like many men women, my ex did just that during separation, and the psychological abuse of our child was so bad that the judge awarded me sole custody and gave him a permanent no-contact order. We were very lucky to be the exception, since in most cases, judges award shared custody, and the children continue to suffer abuse, perhaps more so because they get the abuse formerly directed directly at the spouse.
You wrote that you are still stunned that she didn’t protect you from the disrespect and abuse.
Please consider that when she saw an escalated threat–his drinking– she DID get you out.
While I empathize with what you went through, I’m a bit stunned that knowing the situation, YOU are disrespecting your mom for not having the strength and resources to leave her abuser earlier. Consider that like your dad, you are putting her down for not being enough. Now you’re the one saying your mom is stupid for not getting all of you out sooner.
What if she had, and your dad did get visitation or shared custody when you were younger, and escalated while he was solely with small children and she was unable to deter or deflect him?
Therapy or a few good conversations may help you understand that your mom may have done what she thought was the best thing possible for your physical safety. She may have been correct. You may be idealizing a poor but happy scenario if she left your dad sooner, but the reality might have been soup kitchens, shelters, and the stress of fearing you won’t have food or a bed to sleep in.
(I’ve commented about this before so sorry for the redundancy)
Especially when this goes on since birth, children can apparently internalize the abuser’s view of the victim parent and unconsciously emulate it. Then on top of this the culture encourages mommy-blame and frowns on holding dads accountable. Even though it appears to presume that fathers can cause lasting issues in their children, the typical bro-goading of women that they have “daddy issues” works nicely as a silencing tactic.
But the culture at large generally encourages holding mothers responsible for everything that goes wrong with children both directly and indirectly by something called “Momism”– holding nearly impossible expectations for the “natural nurturing/self-sacrificing” qualities of women (which are bound to be disappointed)– and by decontextualizing women’s apparent passivity in the face of abuse by ignoring all the ways in which women in every generation are entrapped by circumstances.
As for the direct cultural cues that encourage the “mothers make monsters” trope (and discourage dad-blame or male role model-blame), take the FBI’s history of applying the more misogynistic aspects of Freudian theory to serial killers from the early days of the Behavioral Analysis Unit or “serial killer task force.” Whether investigators were too prone to take at face value the mommy-hatred of several notorious killers like Bundy and Edmund Kemper or whether investigators were encouraging this narrative (something clinical narcissists would predictably pick up on and opportunistically play into), both initially insisted their mothers’ lack of love and respect for them drove them to torture, rape and kill.
Though the above explanation might satisfy those who believe in unproven (and ickily eugenic) “genetic criminality” concepts, it doesn’t make any sense from a “nurture” perspective since typically violent adult criminals reeneact and emulate some equivalent of sadistic violence they experienced and/or witnessed as children. But what does make sense according to clinical research is that many violent adult perpetrators lie about or disremember violent abuse from childhood and also have a tendency to cover up for their primary abusive role models. It also makes sense that, as they’re reenacting the violence they witnessed or experienced, they would– again– also reenact the victim-blaming– i.e., “neutralization/guilt-reduction” tactics– they witnessed from their primary abusive role models.
In any event, the FBI, and, in turn, the public seemed to accept for years that boys simply being subjected to a lack of nurturing or verbal criticism from mothers or, conversely, stifling “over-protectiveness” was enough to trigger murderous tendencies in their offspring which increased the societal pressure on mothers to achieve mythical levels of perfection and balance on some razor wire to avoid being labeled either “fridge mom” or “suffocating.”
This seems to still be the case because both the series Mindhunter that included Kemper’s case and the Bundy biopic Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile drew criticism for leaving out any hint of violent male role models despite the fact that credible information came out later that both Bundy’s and Kemper’s respective grandfathers had been sadistic and violent to many members of the family and most likely sexually abused Bundy and Kemper.
Despite taking liberties with timelines and characters, Mindhunter was pretty consistent with the “mothers make monsters” view in several of the cases it featured, if anything citing fathers for being absent even when, in real life, they were not continually absent (several were around long enough to severely traumatize their families).
Anyway, mommy blame still zombies on as several social science papers on the subject argue like “Mindunter and the Persistence of Mother Blame” and “Victims and Villains: The Legacy of Mother Blame in Violent-Eye American Literature.”
My ex/FW demonizes his mother and even tried at one point to blame her for his cheating, but his own father was the serial cheater who eventually abandoned them.
My ex MIL unfortunately did the trite expected thing of not telling child (FW, a teen at the time) the real reason for their divorce (infidelity). This allowed a slow distortion of the marriage from ex FIL (Liars lie) so that FW eventually blamed his own mother, the Chump who raised him as a struggling single mom, for the parents divorce!
Cautionary tale
That’s a great cautionary tale.
But I can understand victims’ hesitation to tell kids the truth given how “parental alienation” charges can lead to loss of custody. Even before this blameshifting tactic had a name or became a common and terrifyingly effective tactic used by domestic abusers in family court, I think women probably always had a gut terror of being cast as “disrupting” the pAtErNaL bOnD even in cases where men were abusing their children directly.
Dang, that feels like a Truth Bomb
As a non-leaver, I share that I didnt leave when they were young because even though I saw my husband as being a threat sometimes, I felt that unreliable childcare might be an immediate threat to the kids well being. In our shared home as it was, I felt I had more control in how I kept them safe.
I’m with you since a crappy caregiver could have conceivably killed my once medically fragile, catastrophically allergic son with a doughnut or using the wrong hairspray. But even regarding his less fragile siblings, I saw how the wrong caregiver could cause lasting harm… that is, if anyone can even afford it in the US.
I honestly think that we chumps (same as FWs) need to get to a point where we quit blaming our parents. Either with or without treatment, whatever it takes. Perfect parents are few and far between, if they exist at all. If they are truly toxic, cut them out of your life. If they were decent, but flawed forgive them.
Hi DaughterOAC.
Every word you wrote, my daughter could have written. I’ve said this to her, and I’ll say it to you:
Gonna stop you right there.
No, you shouldn’t just “get over” trauma. That’s not how it works. Trauma is tricky. You can put it in a drawer but sooner or later it’s going to jump out at you…probably when you least suspect…or worse, when you have the least capacity to address it(usually in the midst of other goofiness.)
Here is why you are not going to “get over” that-yours is two ply-
1) Your father was a scumbag and verbally and emotionally abused you, contributing to longer lasting feelings of un-safety, etc.
2) Your mother got Chumped and it radiated downward. “Why didn’t either parent protect me?”
Fortunately you have dodged the chump bullet. You have that going for you.
Either way, that stuff sticks around. I repeat: these are the people that were SUPPOSED to make you feel safe, valued, and wanted. If it’s eating at you it’s a problem. And it’s supposed to and allowed to.
I went through something pretty similar (though my mother was the fuckwit in this case and continues to be…rather special.) The way we are raised informs our worldview. I have been spending therapy time unpacking a lot of that. I have learned that I cannot make either of them into better parents. I CAN, however, repair my concepts of safety and self worth and cope better with the person that has made me.
Have a Mighty Monday!
Thanks so much for this perspective. You are Mighty! My brothers don’t seem to be as traumatized by it, so I feel that in some way I should not be so sensitive/ get over it as they appear to have. My father wasn’t so much a scumbag, as he was weak, self indulgent, selfish and suffering from mental health issues as well. He was … charming, and intelligent, but also very, very erratic. My mother was, for most of those years, grim, complaining, and unhappy. it is so hard to unpick what he had control over (and did anyway) and what he didn’t have control over (and did). I *am* heartened that this abuse has not repeated itself for my daughter’s generation. There is hope for the future!
My belief that I had a great marriage served me in that my children believed the same thing. In the time that my marriage was crumbling they became married stable adults.
I had spackled heavily, overcompensated, and made my needs small enough that Cheaty McLiarface appeared as husband and father of the year for decades. He liked that… a lot. Now I walk the thin line between letting the kids in on the reality of our family life and not destroying every good memory and belief that they have about the man I chose to be their father.
Your story breaks my heart because it makes me think of the film Life is Beautiful where the protagonist protects his son from the traumatic revelation that they’re in Nazi death camp by absorbing all the horror himself and pretending it’s all a game. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9lTSqc1UnLU
If the story were true, I would hope that, in the sequel, the son of this character grows up and eventually learned all his father did to protect him out of pure love.
In 1st previous marriage denied a mortgage because as a woman, I had the “potential to become pregnant,” therefore my income didn’t count as much even though we both had professional occupations, degrees and no credit issues, and this was in 1982!
CL – thanks for framing your reply the way you did. My growing up had things in common with this story, and I’ve been angry at my (late) Mum for some things which still hurt. She did her best, which wasn’t always great although sometimes it was, and your response rings true at least from my own perspective.
Neither my mother or my father had mother’s. My material side left my grandfather and her baby and went back home to Puerto Rico. My paternal grandmother was “taken away after her 4 babies died one after the others. My mother stayed married to my verbally and raging abusive father who did everything else right..if you can count that. I married 2 cheaters 30 years apart. My first cheater married his AP and now we are all aging. It dawned on me recently that my children will be caring for OW/wife if their father passes away first. He is already debilitated!!Anyone ever think of that? My daughter, watching me with 2 cheaters married a raging dry alcoholic. Does the cycle ever end leaving them or not? Do we all have to learn our own lessons? I stayed too long with #2 cheaters but I hated to fail. He was a horrible example as was I the last 10 years. Regrets are always there but I would have different regrets no matter what I do. I chose to save myself in the end so I could be sane. That was all I could do
This is a subject close to my heart and mind. My mother did not protect me, either. She also used me as part of her toolbox of how to manage my volatile and mentally ill cheating father’s emotions and behavior. She did not know he sexually abused me when I was under eight years old, but every time she told me to “go and sit in Daddy’s lap,” knowing my presence would calm him down, was torture to me, but I felt responsible for protecting my mother and brother from his abuse.
One night when he had her down on the floor strangling her, it was me who came and yelled at him to let her up. She bundled me and my baby sister into the car, and I begged her to take us away somewhere safe. When she said she better go in and check on my father, I told her that if she went back in that house she was crazy. Even that brush with death didn’t convince her to leave.
I am sure she had her reasons. Some of them I understand and even respect . I also came to know that she was an abused wife, with all the psychological distortions that come from that abuse. But her actions and her inaction, her willingness to sacrifice my safety, had their consequences for me. I was probably twelve that night he tried to strangle her and I tried to convince her to leave. After than night I never trusted I could rely on her again.
My mother eventually did leave my father, a dozen years later, in order to protect my sister. I very much respect her for that decision, and although I understand that there were circumstances that were personal, cultural, familial, and financial that enabled her to leave then, it doesn’t change the fact that I still am to this day irrationally bedeviled with the periodic pain of thinking my mother was willing to keep my sister safe but not me.
I very much appreciate JeffWashington’s comment–thank you!
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Daughter of a Chump, CL is right and I think you should give your mother some grace here. As an abused spouse herself, she undoubtedly felt helpless. Any kind of long term abuse will do that to you, not just the physical kind. It’s only been fairly recently that emotional abuse has been recognized as domestic abuse. I didn’t even realize it was happening to me until 2017. Your mom probably didn’t understand it as spousal and child abuse either.
What CL said about married women working is true as well. I remember as late as the 90s a male colleague told me he didn’t think married women should work to support the family, but it was okay to work part time for “pin money.” I snarled at him. Quite literally, like a dog snarls. He took a big step back. 😄
There were social forces in operation against your mother as well as financial and psychological ones. Should she have resisted sooner given the way you were treated by your father? Yes. But she eventually mustered up the guts to do it. Poverty is a terrifying thing and it still keeps women stuck with their abusers. I understand your pain at how long she allowed it to go on. However, it’s your abusive FW father who should be the target of your ire. Your mom is a fellow victim. Is she remorseful about it? Have you talked to her about how you feel? If not, maybe you should. At any rate, your letter is fodder for a great discussion on the folly of staying for the kids. I’m sorry for what you went through. That must have been brutal.
Dear OHFFS – yes, I have brought this up with my mother on a number of occasions. We did not get along well at all most of my growing up years, but now have a very positive relationship and do our best to help each other out. *Her* responses now are threefold: 1) “If I threw him out, I knew he wouldn’t pay the child support” (true, because at the 25 year mark when she did throw him out, my brothers were still at home, and he didn’t pay the child support). 2) “He was a sick man, and I couldn’t abandon him” and 3) It was in the past and I should just let it go.
in fact I do not blame her for staying, most of the anger is against what he was and how he behaved. On one occasion, many years later, he told me that he never understood why my mother thought that he hadn’t been nice to me. I told him exactly why and gave him concrete examples. His response? “I had troubles of my own back then”.
His response… excuses, self pity, defense and a noticeable absence of empathy. Sigh. Now you know where your mother got that poor sad sausage “sick man” impression.
(Note: I’m not the daughter who wrote the letter.) The generational harm from my family of origin is such that there is no next generation. I was afraid of marrying an alcoholic, checked out cheater. So I didn’t, and I have no children. I find it comforting, in a way, to know that the harm ends with me.
Thank goodness, I had 1 sane parent!
I’m not the daughter who wrote the letter, either. We have similar stories in that the generational harm from my family of origin was such that there is no next generation. I was determined not to be the shitty parent that my parents were to me, and so even though I married at 21, wasn’t going to have kids. Turns out I married a cheater, just like Dear Old Dad, and he gave me various STDs that ruined my fertility and probably caused the cancer I had years later. I divorced the husband, and the next time, I married an abuser who I also divorced immediately after he tried to murder me. Then, a dozen years later, I married a handsome, charming Narcissist who — big surprise — was also a cheater and an abuser. So, three divorces and no children.
My sister had five or six failed engagements and then married a Narcissist on her first try. He had a second family for most of the 20 years they were married. My sister also had fertility issues, so no grandchildren for my parents who never let us forget that we had failed them by not giving them grandchildren.
I had no sane parent. But the cycle of abuse ended with my generation.
Replying to my own comment to add that I’m an only child.
I can attest to the systemic economic pressure on women. Beginning in the 80’s, credentialed childcare workers began to fight for a livable wage. Forty years later that still hasn’t been attained and our US government does not see this as a priority. Cuts to healthcare, housing, and education will keep more and more chumps stuck. Vote your values.
Dear CL and all who have written in – thanks so much for all these reflections. To clarify a little, my father was *also* stuck in a bad marriage, couldn’t see a way out, and was weak/ deeply unhappy/ had mental health-pyschological issues. My mother was unusual for her time (the 1960s and 1970s) in that she always worked (but was never the main breadwinner/ family support). I don’t *blame* my mother per se (I know that she did her best in a very difficult situation), and she got out well after I was out of the house (but my younger brothers were not). I *am* angry still. But the anger is mostly against my father – who *does* this to his own kids? When he has had every advantage in life (supportive family, excellent mind, wonderful circle of friends). Why didn’t *someone stop it*? Through CL I’ve come to see that it is because of a) weakness and entitlement on his part and b) the silence that accoimpanies patriarchy and the myth of the self reliant nuclear family (no one, even close family, wanted to “interfere”).
If there is a happy ending here, here it is. Many years later, well after things calmed down (SSRIs helped a lot of those mood swings a lot!), my own 3 year old daughter was visiting with my dad and his second wife. My dad had gone off his meds and was again volatile/ raging/ erratic/ drinking a bit too much. When I saw what was going on (that rage! that anger!) I cried silently in the back seat of the car with my 3 year old – she was at an age when she was often carsick. By the time we got to the house where they lived, I had stopped crying. I then immediately cancelled all of my plans to stay in the area, citing family emergency, and was out of there like a shot because *no one was going to do to my daughter what had been done to me*. My daughter is doing *great* and is the great joy in my life.
My ex MIL dumped her serial cheater hubby because she herself found new sausages she wanted.
So she married a guy who was a serial beater.
3 guesses on whom she lavished praise on unending and the first hundred don’t count.
Yeah, that’s right, she praised the serial beater.
For whatever reason in her mind he was just SO manly beating her and her 3 kids up.
She never protected her kids, instead she joined in and affirmed the action.
So it’s not a surprise after learning about the above that my ex turned out the way she did.
However: my ex still CHOSE to do what she did with conscious decisions and actions.
I stayed for the children. I had my kids in the 70s women had no financial ability to support themselves. Prostitution was probably the most money a woman could make! Very serious about that, sounds funny now. He would not have parented. His mother would happily have taken them and proceeded to beat them. She felt I was a poor mother for not using the belt, on them. His father was a pedophile .a housing project would have been our only choice. My family were alcoholics. I will eat ramen and do without and make do. But their very lives were in danger. Sexual abuse From many angles was real. Now I say.” Go for the children” . But remember women are still second class citizens. I knew a woman in the same circumstances as myself. Her way out was to find a new husband before leaving the first. Making her a “slut”. Support before judgement is important
This post reveals the deep compassion beneath the snark, which makes it a new favorite of mine. (Along with the “drink more coffee” aside!)
We are conditioned so that it feels safer and easier to hate and blame women than men.
The double lives can thrive undetected for a long time. I thought for decades that I had broken the cycle (my mother was abandoned by her first husband) before the lies came to the surface, and then only because I and my children were abandoned. The discard was so gradual. I was oblivious.
Only after we were abandoned by our husband/father (and my parents were long gone) did I find out my beloved father had also cheated on my mother, for years!
Suddenly my perspective on her shifted. She’d been distant and absent: children (adult children too) are so lacking in empathy towards their mothers until late in their own lives. I think we’d all wither in our shells if we knew the full extent of our mothers’ accommodations and sacrifices early on.
My relationship to my mother was so complicated and confusing and my love for my dad was always simple and deep. I still am finding new compassion for my poor sweet mom, along with compassion for the trusting and vulnerable person I was before my FW deserted us. I wouldn’t have ever left, I think, because his secret life would have remained secret. And I would have stayed lonely and uncomprehending.
This post left me physically ill because it hit too close to home.
My FW isn’t just a cheater, he is an all around jerk incapable of regulating his emotions. That means that myself and my children were subjected to all kinds of anger on a daily basis. The cheating was what made me finally realize I had to get out.
I can make excuses as to why it took that, because surely his rage prior to cheating was a good enough reason to run.
Some of it was that I thought I was jsut honoring my vows of for better or worse, overlooking his “flaws”. Some of it was that I was afraid of making an actual enemy of him. I grew up watching my own mother do the same thing. That didn’t help.
I didn’t think it was so bad for my kids. I know that sounds crazy. But my kids were very close to their dad. Very bonded and they SEEMED unaffected. He also was kinder to them than me. But he still raged at them and around them far too much. The older one doesn’t speak to him.
I regret not getting out sooner. But they are teens and I am out now. So I can only hope it was early enough to break this cycle.
I hope my daughters don’t grow up to walk on eggshel;ls like their mom and grandmother did.
I don’t think there is a truly single answer to this issue. I have been married for thirty years and I believe that I would end our marriage if I found he was unfaithful. That being said, my parents stayed together for over thirty years (sadly both died in their early 60’s) in what I would term a deeply unhappy marriage. My father was unfaithful to my mother in the early years of their marriage. My mother not only told me about this but I also found independent evidence in the form of a letter my father wrote my mother informing her that he was leaving her. They apparently did decide to reconcile. Their was no substance abuse or physical abuse but plenty of verbal and emotional abuse between the two. I do deeply regret that both of their lives were not happier and that neither of them was with someone who they could truly be happy with.
My mother had been abused as a child and suffered from Bipolar disorder though throughout most of my growing up was treated primarily for depression. Before my birth she attempted suicide twice and was hospitalized. Throughout my growing up she was under psychiatric care though was not hospitalized. She tended to be very shy, needy, dependent and prone to emotional scens. She was also an extremely bright woman who should have married a scholarly gentle man. My father was an extrovert, somewhat impatient man who tended to have a hot temper but was at the same time very loving who should have married someone who was strong, willing to stand up to him, was more independent and who was willing to socialize more.
Despite all of this, as one of my brothers once commented “The only thing they agreed on was us” They were both extremely devoted to their children, supportive, loving and worked unceasingly to provide for us and to encourage us.
I won’t say that this hasn’t affected us. Personally, I am very sensitive to perceived criticism from my spouse and I can tell when I am becoming depressed when I start worrying he doesn’t love me anymore despite his unwavering love and support.
As I stated I have been married for 30 years and overall I would say that we are generally very happy. My oldest brother has been married for over 40 years and appear to be happily married. My middle brother was married for 30 years until his wife passed away and after several years of mourning he has begun forming a relationship with a widow he met on an online dating site. He too was happy in his marriage and he appears to be much happier settling into a new serious relationship. There has been no infidelity on mine or their parts (as far as I know but knowing them and their lifelong characters, I seriously doubt it). My oldest brother and I both have advanced degrees with good careers and my middle brother worked in federal law enforcement for many years before retiring. In general, our kids have also turned out quite well (except for one, there’s always one).
I had a good relationship with both my parents until their deaths (in fact I was their primary caregiver in the months before their deaths.)
Just one data point of course among many others.