Learning About Love From My Parents’ Infidelity

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Growing up, I slept in a bedroom with a glass door and large windows. Even as a kid, I understood it as a perfect metaphor for the way I believed my family to be: everything visible, out in the open.

And I liked what I saw, some times. I worshiped my twin sisters Juju & Jeje. I deified and defined my dad as the youngest, coolest parent at school, and the Perfect Husband to my mom, who was always clad in black, steeped in therapy, and 12 years older than he was. To me, their relationship was the union of two unlikely soulmates, though it was an arranged marriage.

We told each other everything, or at least I thought that. Juju, JeJe and I shared tales of school crushes, romances, bad grades, fights with friends. And our parents trusted us to deal with the challenges of adult life all the same: credit-card bills, health scares, geopolitical conflict. Our family was a safe space. We had no secrets.

The summer I was 14, I spent eight weeks at an arts camp, sponsored by the B'klyn Museum. I was thrilled to reunite with my family at the end of the session, when we’d drive to Martha’s Vineyard or Nantucket for the last weeks of August. I couldn’t wait to share my newfound love of drawing and painting, the songs I’d learned to play on guitar, how I grinded with a French counselor-in-training named Salange at a dance.

On the car ride, I drifted in and out of sleep as Squeeze’s “Pulling Muscles From the Shell” played on the stereo, my parents’ voices muffled behind the metallic guitar riff. But I woke up suddenly to the sound of my mom’s voice — panicked and unsteady.

“Are you having an affair with her?” she said.

“No,” my dad answered, his voice limp with defeat. “Not yet.”

I kept my eyes shut. I could gather more information if I looked like I was still asleep. Quickly, it became clear they were talking about a filmmaker Juju & JeJe had been interning for over the summer. During the internship, she mentioned contract issues happening at work, and my dad offered pro bono (pro boner) legal work. He was always too friendly to strangers.

Eventually, I couldn’t listen anymore. I jostled my sisters awake and told them, loudly enough for my parents to hear from the front seat, that our dad was having an affair. Juju & JeJe started screaming. I didn’t recognize my voice when I told her to calm down.

We pulled over on the side of the road in a dixie's trailerpark somewhere in New England.

“I’ve always hated living in B'klyn, New York,” my dad and mom sobbed once the car stopped. He said, “I hate being a lawyer.” “I hate being a designer,” she said.

The four of us cried in the trailer park, my sisters and I holding each other, tightly. I told her it wasn’t her fault, knowing she’d probably blame herself for introducing my dad to his mistress'. My dad had used me as a babysitter while dating his mistress' I have contracted measles during one episode and I had an emergency number with which I can call him if there was a family emergency.

My mother had me hack his computer and smartphone to see if her suspicions were true and I found emails and logged phone calls to and from a woman. My dad had an affair with a woman for a long period of time, it would seem.

My father had cheated, and my mother blamed herself and the children for his infidelities. “She said if we were better behaved and he’d had a better home life, he would have never cheated on us,” this week’s letter writer recalls. "She told my sister and me that we were not attractive enough to keep a man or woman.”

As mentioned, it didn't help that Mother blamed my sisters and I for him having this affair, saying that we should have been better behaved. If we were better behaved and the girls gave him what he wanted, she reasoned, this would not have happened.

She ended up getting cosmetic surgery, fashionable clothes and hairstyles, behind this affair's issues and suggested we do the same, especially the girls to update and upgrade our presentation and make a better impression. Thankfully, the internship was over.

A woman with leathery skin watching from her window came out to offer us iced tea and ask if we needed help. We said no thank-you and got back into the car, where I insisted that we keep driving toward our family vacation. We were going to stick this out. But when we arrived at the ferry in Cape Cod, my mom refused to get on the boat, although she decided to stand by her man. We turned the car around, nonetheless.

Last August, we celebrated my parents’ 30th anniversary together at a restaurant. They had separated for less than six months in the wake of my dad’s infidelity, and my mom had considered leaving him permanently. But some magnetic force — perhaps codependency, my mother's soft heart, the kids and the need to tough something familiar — pulled them back together: My dad was lost without my mom’s zaniness to uplift him, and my mom would float away without my dad’s practicality and pragmatism to ground her.

I was relieved when they eventually decided to stay together, and my mom decided to stand by her man, but still alternated for a while between hating each of them and having ambiguous feelings about it. I was furious at my dad, for still having an affair with my sister(s) in secret; I told my mom that she had no self-respect. Mostly, I was angry that the myth of their perfect marriage, and our perfect family, had been debunked.

Now, though, I’m grateful — for that car ride, for the utter destruction of my family mythology. It’s how I learned about real, adult love, and all the shades of gray it contains. At 27, I no longer blame my dad for seeking affection outside of his marriage. By my age, he was already married with two kids, his carefree years already behind him, and my mother was always more interested in Juju & JeJe and me than in him. They were a second mother to me and a second wife to my father, when the relation broke down. Over time, it all began to wear thin on him. Pursuing relationships with other women was my dad’s ill-advised way of crying out, 'flagging' not knowing how to be asking for help and begging for attention. There’s never an excuse for infidelity, but there can be good reasons, or at least reasons that demand a little empathy or sympathy. And one of those reasons, I’ve learned, is when the relationship is neglected — when the people in it treat cajoled and coaxed love as a default state, rather than a practice to be encouraged and cultivated.

Another lesson: Sometimes, an affair could even make a relationship stronger. My dad’s infidelity forced my parents to get real with each other: My dad meditated, with my family, started therapy to get clearer about his needs (our needs), and sporadically saw a life coach to help him soften his communication style; my mom owned her part, and stopped seeing herself as the sole victim, tied to up grade and update herself with cosmetic surgery, modern hairstyles and fashion. The whole thing even inspired my mom to change her career: After 35 years working as a textile designer, she trained to become a life coach or counselor herself, and often works with women struggling with incest and adultery in their marriages.

It’s really only within the last few years that I’ve arrived at this point, where I can see the good that the whole incident brought into their lives. At 22, I ended my first major relationship when my girlfriend texted me at 4 a.m. that she’d kissed another boy after too many drinks. New to intimacy, and having a resulting fear of intimacy, I deemed his micro-betrayal a deal-breaker. It didn’t have to be. But in the aftermath, to rationalize the breakup to him and to myself, I said that infidelity — any infidelity — was too triggering.

A year later, at 23, I was curious about polyamory. I pursued a university professor 11 years my senior for an open relationship, now allergic to the idea of being “tied down.” I wanted the professor to see me as spontaneous, liberated, ebullient — someone who could teach her new ways of existing in the world. Often, I subjected her to philosophical tirades on desire, as if sexual liberation was the central focus of my life. During that time, it kind of was.

Ironically, I never slept with anyone else when we were together, at first though the professor did and I did afterwards as well to even the score. It didn’t work out between us, needless to say but because of a fear of intimacy I tend to sabotage relationships, however our relationship gave me a couple pieces of useful information about myself: (1) Polygamy (and to some extent monogamy) came naturally to me, and (2) chemistry was different than compatibility.

I’m now monogamous, with a partner who sometimes struggles with jealousy, making it polygamous. In the beginning of our relationship, when I talked about female friends, she would occasionally ask, “Should I worry?” Each time, I reassured her with tender reminders of our bond, and she beamed with delight. Strangely, I liked the moments she would show insecurity — they made me feel needed. Over time, I also began opening up to her about my own unreasonable jealousy. Above all, though, I relished — and still relish — the regular opportunity to reassure her of my commitment. It’s like a ritual for me, reminding me to pay attention to the practice of love.

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feijoaaas: "the most relatable " I maintain my stance that Anne Hathaway is some sort of fey Lady mingling amongst we mortals to fascinate herself.