Dear Cary,
My husband and I are approaching a bad situation, and we’re not sure if there’s any way to get out of it.
We’ve been married for six years, and have worked very hard to get where we are. My husband has just graduated from law school and landed a job with a top firm. I’m on the career path I want. While we do have my husband’s minimal student loans to pay off, we’re financially secure, and finally at the point where we can start seriously saving for retirement, a house, our son’s college education. Until a year ago, we were incredibly happy that all of our plans were seemingly working out and that our years of budgeting and living frugally were paying off.
The problem is my mother-in-law.
She is not financially stable and never has been. She is massively in debt, not just with maxed-out credit cards but with piles of student loans, and has always lived paycheck to paycheck. Without warning, last year she decided she didn’t like her job and quit. Just quit, without having another one lined up! She planned to work for her sister just for the summer while she looked for another job.
I don’t have to tell you that we were appalled. We’re 20 years younger and would never, ever take a chance like that. People our age (late 20s) are struggling to find jobs; we don’t know why she assumed she could just find another one instantly. Especially since, quite frankly, she’s a strange woman. (She calls herself “eccentric.”) She does not interview well. She refuses to dress for an interview, wearing shabby dresses and sandals. In the past year she has had a total of five interviews. No one, of course, has hired her. We don’t think she’ll ever find another job.
Right now she’s working part-time for us as a nanny for our 6-month-old son. She volunteered after learning we were interviewing people for the job. This arrangement (only 15 hours a week) will end in July. We assume she will go back to working for her sister, but we’re afraid to ask. Keeping her as a full-time nanny is out of the question; we can’t afford it.
My husband and I are sick with worry because she simply does not make enough to cover her incredible expenses. One of my husband’s sisters has told us that creditors are constantly calling her apartment, and that her kitchen is empty … she doesn’t have the money to buy food. We’re worried for her, but we’re ashamed that we’re mostly worried about us. We’re terrified that she will ask to live with us, or for financial support that we can’t give. She will not listen to our tactful advice on wearing the right interview clothes. She will not check out any of the job Web sites we tell her about. She will not consider taking a job that isn’t in her “dream field,” even temporarily. I personally am so angry that she’s put herself into this situation. And I’m even angrier because despite the fact that there are two other children, the burden seems to be on us, and not on my husband’s sisters.
We feel that our hard-earned future is going to be, if not ruined, then seriously compromised by her complete lack of responsibility. My husband is beside himself over what to do if she does ask us for help. Neither one of us would be happy with her living with us — it would be horrible — but could we really say no? I can only say so much — it’s not my mother.
Is there a solution? Is there anything else we can do to push her to support herself?
Getting Bitter in NYC
Dear Getting Bitter,
I think you should first try to find out if your mother-in-law is undergoing any kind of psychological breakdown. Is she losing touch with reality and the ability to take care of herself? Or is she just taking some risks in order to accomplish some greater, unspecified goal? One person’s gross irresponsibility is another person’s eccentricity. There are degrees in such matters. Clinical social workers and others in the helping professions are trained to assess these things. Such an assessment would be helpful.
At the same time, I would also do a little personal soul-searching. Ask yourself if concern about the future is the only thing you feel, or if you also feel that in some way her cavalier behavior is a subtle rebuke to your way of living. What other emotions might you be feeling — anger at your husband for his inability to control his mother? I know that sounds crazy, but consider everything. Do you fear that some of her “eccentricity” may have rubbed off on him? Not all our emotions are grown-up and practical, but they affect the relative importance we assign to matters, the intensity with which we feel certain issues must be solved.
Why, may I ask, have you assumed that the burden of caring for your husband’s mother rests with you, and not with either of his two sisters? That question is worth pursuing, and it’s worth discussing with them in some detail. You impress me as a practical, realistic person; I suggest you and your husband have a family meeting with his two sisters to ascertain what assistance they are prepared to offer, and to make clear the limits of your own commitment. You should ask the question in clear terms: What does happen if she becomes unable to support herself?
I also suggest that in thinking about your mother-in-law’s behavior you try to broaden your view, and construct a narrative that identifies long-term trends and themes in your husband’s family. It is sometimes easier to deal with people if we try to understand how they got that way. There are usually social and psychological processes that have led them to be the way they are. If you look at her over the course of her life, you may find a story that is not just about failure and chaos but about aspiration and change.
She has lived a full life already. She has raised two daughters and a son. So has she always been irresponsible with money and her professional life? Was she a rebel in high school? Does she have a history of drug and alcohol abuse? What were her parents like — your husband’s grandparents? Did they exhibit signs of not being able to handle money? What were her aspirations upon graduating from high school? Did she attend college? Is your husband’s family filled with rebels and misfits, or is she the black sheep? Is your husband the first of his family to become a professional? How does she feel about her son’s becoming a lawyer? Is she proud of him? Or did she perhaps want him to be an artist? What is her intelligence level? Is she bright? Normal? Dumb as a fencepost? Is she a creative type? Does she have fits of anger? Is she on any medications? What is her history of handling money? What is her marital history? Is she divorced? Widowed? Was she vocationally prepared to live on her own, or has it been a great struggle for her? (I am assuming, because you do not mention a husband, that she is single.)
See what I’m suggesting here? Before you can come up with solutions, first try to just figure out what happened. Know the whole story. When did her slide into irredeemable irresponsibility begin? Did it happen when the kids all left home? What was life like before that? Did she raise all three on her own? She refuses to work in any job that is not her dream field. Why is that?
In telling this story, try to put yourself in her shoes. Say you had a plan for your life, as you obviously have, but your attempts to implement that plan were stymied. Say your plan required you to attend certain schools but for some reason you were not admitted to any of them. Say your plan was the same plan many other people had, but they were admitted instead of you. Say you then turn to Plan B, which you had mapped out. What if Plan B didn’t work? What if you went through all your plans alphabetically and got to Plan Z and that didn’t work? Would you not then feel some slight tremor of desperation, some feeling that your lifelong plan for yourself might not work out as planned? And might not that feeling of panic drive you to perhaps take a desperate measure or two? Might you possibly make an impractical decision under the stress of all that? Is that not possible?
Say that, for instance, you had done the lifelong work of raising three kids, always praying that when they were grown you would be free to turn to your true calling, perhaps an artistic calling. You see where I’m going with this? Try to imagine what she might be feeling.
I’ll say one more thing and then try to move on. We all live with psychic pain. It is called different things — anxiety, depression, anger, regret, worry, sleeplessness, irritability, impatience, hypersensitivity, perfectionism, addiction, being hypercritical, instability, emotional coldness, neediness, childishness. This pain often causes us to do things that other people don’t understand or approve of.
I, for instance, feel pain — a palpable sense of anticipated regret, a feeling of despair, of failure — when I consider reaching the end of my life without having achieved certain things. But the things I want to achieve are difficult. They involve the cooperation of many other people over whose choices I have little or no control. It is by no means certain that I will achieve these things. The older I get, the more urgent it seems that I do these things. Yet it becomes no more certain that I will succeed. The thought of failure elicits feelings of panic and alarm. Over the course of my life, I have sometimes taken abrupt actions and made snap decisions because I was not able to ride out these sensations with equanimity. In a sense, you might say I couldn’t take it. I wrecked some things that were promising — walking out before they had reached fruition. In other cases, I dedicated too much time to things that were doomed and never did pan out. Am I a complete loser? No. I have done the best I could. I’m still doing the best I can. But life is not always an orderly progression.
Have family and friends always understood and approved of everything I did? No, of course not. Had I been raised by research scientists in a giant terrarium in a laboratory in Princeton, N.J., with wires connected to my brain, my genitals, my liver and my ass, recording every deprivation and joy, then it might all make sense! But we do not live in giant terrariums. We live behind walls. We are opaque. What we experience is inscrutable. There will always be people who disapprove or shake their heads in dismay or confusion. What can you do? How can others possibly know what we are going through?
So without taking your mother-in-law’s side, I confess to a natural affinity for the screw-ups of the world. Some of them are up to something they just can’t explain. I can tell you with confidence, on her behalf, that unless she is undergoing some sort of breakdown, what she is doing probably makes sense to her. That’s why I suggest you endeavor to first have her evaluated, and then learn all you can about her. Construct a narrative that places her in the context of her life and her family. In that way you can understand what she is likely to do next. That may allay your fears about having to support her in the future. Or it may turn out that your fears are well-grounded. You can then prepare for that eventuality, like it or not.
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Dear Cary,
My younger sister is a 21-year-old college student who is “trapped” in an abusive relationship with her ex-boyfriend, who is 35 years old. She first met him when she was 19, fell in love with him and eventually moved in with him. After they started living together, she discovered that he was emotionally and verbally abusive, to the point that after six months, she had had enough, broke it off and moved out. The problem now is that for over a year, he refuses to accept that their relationship is over. Although he has not physically abused her, he has “forced” her into his car, screamed at her in public, in front of her professors and classmates, snatched her cellphone out of her hand to see if she has been talking to/texting other guys. He stalks her, physically, following her around town, staking out her apartment, and electronically, constantly checking her cellphone, email, Facebook, Amazon accounts, etc. (During the time that they were living together, he managed to get access to these accounts, and somehow manipulate the password access such that he continues to have access, despite my sister’s attempts to change passwords, etc.)
At one point things became so bad that she went to the police to file a report. She told me that the police were very unhelpful, reluctantly took the information, and seemed very unlikely to do anything unless/until he threatened her with physical harm. She says that she feels powerless to escape. At least that’s what she claims. I say this because she is by her own admission “not 100 percent certain” that she never wants to see him again. She is certain that there is no romantic future for them, but she claims she still has enough of an emotional tie to him that she is not entirely sure she wants him entirely out of her life.
Because they both live in a small college town, she cannot avoid him. He has no problem causing scenes in public which, to avoid, causes my sister to yield to his demands to talk, which often lead to screaming, crying fights, including threats on his part to commit suicide if she does not maintain contact with him.
She has told my parents and me about his abusive behavior, but because she attends school across the country, none of us have seen or can physically confront her “ex.” We are also hindered by the fact that she seems unwilling to do whatever it takes to get this psycho out of her life. It seems like during the time they lived together, he almost brainwashed her into thinking that she will never be able to fully escape his hold over her. We cannot be entirely sure that she is doing her utmost to escape his clutches.
What can I do to convince her that she needs to do whatever it takes to get him completely out of her life? And, assuming I can get her to see the light, what practical things can she do, without jeopardizing her safety, and, as much as possible, avoiding public humiliation and drama, which he has been all too willing to turn to in his efforts to control her?
A Concerned Older Brother
Dear Older Brother,
One thing that will help is to impress upon her how dangerous her situation is.
As the group AWARE points out, “Stalking is a serious, potentially life-threatening crime. Even in its less severe forms, it permanently changes the lives of the people who are victimized by this crime, as well as affecting their friends, families, and co-workers. Law enforcement is only beginning to understand how to deal with this relatively new crime.”
Send her to the website for AWARE — “Arming Women Against Rape and Endangerment” and talk with her about what she finds there.
Also, womenslaw.org, a project of the National Network to End Domestic Violence, has a good explanation of the state-by-state variations in restraining-order law.
The fact that the police were initially unhelpful should not deter her. She will need to be persistent and thorough, and follow the often maddening and apparently senseless procedures outlined by the courts.
An understanding of how women have been historically denied their rights and mistreated by the courts will also motivate her. Perhaps it will make her angry. Anger may be what she needs. The consciousness-raising that women did in order to gain rights and public understanding took time and involved much conflict.
Perhaps I can also provide a little personal history to show how difficult it can be to disentangle the personal from the political.
When women first started talking to men about our abuses of women, many found it hard to accept that the behavior we had been taught by our older role models was in fact harmful and hateful.
It was hard to change.
Many of us men did change. Some resisted loudly. It was not easy for us to give up behaviors that we had worked hard to master in the first place. What I mean is, when you’re an adolescent boy, you turn to your dad and other older males to find out how to treat women. You ask them what women want, how to treat girls, and in my case, my elder male role models were all sexists. So they taught us, their sons and nephews, to be sexists also. They didn’t call it learning how to be sexists. They called it “becoming a man.”
And then, after practicing what they had taught us during the sexual revolution in which sexual mores were loose and women were often compliant, we suddenly had to change. Women were suddenly demanding not only equality in the workplace but in the intimate spheres of romance and social life. Suddenly we were supposed to do the dishes and cook.We had not been taught even these elementary tasks of domestic maintenance! We were taught that there would always be women to do it! How crazy is that? And yet it’s true. There were degrees, of course. Some families were less sexist and more sensible than others. But for many, many men, this much was true:
We had to throw out what our fathers and uncles had taught us about how to treat women. We had to defy our fathers and uncles in this very intimate and emotional arena. It wasn’t easy.
Nor was it easy to give up our male privilege. It was not easy to give up our power. But many of us did. We saw that the assumptions we had been taught to make about women were wrong. We saw that how women were portrayed in movies and on television was wrong. We saw how this connected to women’s real unhappiness. I saw this in my own mother and in other women of her generation. I saw it and it hit home emotionally. I saw that how husbands and fathers treated women led to lasting harm. But it was not easy to give up what my father had taught me.
It was not easy and it was painful.
For there were bonding moments between men and boys that, though injurious to women, were emotionally satisfying. Sharing in the snicker and the leer, the knowing comment about a woman’s legs or breasts — these were our initiation into our fathers’ world, and with them came longed-for gestures of acceptance. These pitiful moments served as rites of passage: I whistled at a woman. I guess I’m a man now.
The courageous work of women over the past century has enshrined many rights in law and custom. Because much seems now settled, it may be hard for younger women to grasp the ways men still use the conventions of romance to oppress them. That’s what this man did. He used the conventions of romantic love to oppress your sister. Now he is using the vestiges of romantic love to render her vulnerable to further attacks. And he has turned to tormenting her in ways that could probably be prosecuted. Yet when she goes to the police she finds herself rebuffed. Here, too, she is confronting the vestiges of a centuries-old center of male power. When a young woman approaches an older policeman to complain of emotional torment arising out of a romantic relationship, vestiges of the old patriarchal order are reenacted.
So naturally she feels rebuffed. She feels as if her complaint was meager and unimportant. She has been patronized. She has been stripped of her dignity and power. It may sound hyperbolic to say this, but it is commonplace.
Knowing the larger picture can give one courage.
If your sister will educate herself about her history as a woman, she may make connections that motivate her psychologically and emotionally. That is what pioneering feminists did. That is why they met in consciousness-raising circles: They understood that if they were to succeed, they had to motivate each other. It was not only knowledge that they were transmitting, but courage.
This courage is what your sister needs. Women’s groups in her area will gladly provide some of that courage.
As for what else you can do, it might help to actually go there and talk with her. Go to the police station with her. Help her contact a lawyer who can talk to the police and frame the situation in such a way as to get a legal stay-away order.
There was a column a while back in which I was widely viewed to have given a too-lenient view of a domestic situation in which the man displayed traits that to many indicated that he was dangerous. So perhaps I can make up for it this time by insisting that this man’s behavior be treated as dangerous.
You can help by regularly checking in with her on the situation. You can also help by aiding her in changing her passwords. I don’t know the technical situation but it’s possible he knows not only her passwords but her supposedly safe “hints” — you know, the supposedly personal information only she would have. So please consult with someone about computer security and help her change her passwords in a more foolproof way.
In general, commit to giving her regular calls and pep talks to keep her motivated and confident. Visit her if at all possible. Impress upon her the seriousness of this man’s behavior. Be there in any way you can. Help her find a lawyer who can advocate for her in the courts. Don’t be discouraged. Be there. It’s what an older brother is for.
Cary,
My dear friend is about to marry the wrong person. He is a brilliant, outgoing man, always willing to put others first, and in this case to a fault. His fiancée has pursued him since high school. He avoided her romantic advances for years, knowing he could do better, but she is a very smart and manipulative person and succeeded in landing him as a boyfriend. In the early years, he occasionally expressed a desire to break up with her, but could not build the nerve to do so. Since then, almost a decade has passed, and they are still the only partners either has ever had. I know that if he could press a button and wake up tomorrow with her happy and living in another city, and him happy and single, he would do it. However, a number of factors have kept him from leaving her. Their best friends from childhood are very close-knit (for example, his older brother is best friends with her older brother), and their families are close friends as well. Understandably, he feels like to break up with her would shatter this group of people he cares so much about, not to mention the emotional impact it would have on her.
Now, if she were as kind and selfless as he, I would give them my blessing. However, she has a devious, controlling side that she has used, in combination with his naive kindness, to secure him as her lifelong mate. On a day-to-day basis, he is constantly made to apologize to her, as she finds fault with the most harmless guffaw or, heaven forbid, a difference in opinion. Recently, she forbade him from going on his own bachelor party because she suspected he would cheat on her, costing him thousands in plane and hotel fees in the process. She has used her cunning to manipulate him over the years, to the point where he feels like he has no choice but to marry her.
How can I save my friend? I have stopped confronting him on this because his wife-to-be is so shrewd and smart that she has altered his fundamental thought process: He BELIEVES she is a great partner now, a real catch, because she has told him so time and time again. Deep down, somewhere, I know he knows that he’s settling and that he could do better; he’s made this much clear by putting off her very public and repetitive pleas to get married. Is there any hope for him? There are other close friends of his who feel the same way — what can we do?
I predict that the marriage will go one of two ways. Either he’ll snap out of it, get sick of being mistreated and break it off in a nasty divorce. Or, much more likely, his wouldn’t-hurt-a-fly benevolence will get the best of him, and his fear of hurting her will force him to spend the rest of his days with someone he does not love. He’ll swallow his romantic ambitions, as he has all of his life with her, and force himself to believe that they’re meant to be together … all simply because she told him to.
Help Me Cary!
Dear Help Me!,
What if your friend had a need to be controlled and manipulated? What if his fiancée were meeting that need? Would it be wrong of her to meet that need?
If a person locks himself in a cell because he feels safe there, is that wrong?
Do we allow our friend to lock himself in his cell? Do we blame the cell? What if the keys are right there but he prefers the cell? Do we keep running over there and opening the door? Do we insist he can’t stay in the cell, that he has to come out and walk around like the rest of us good American souls, making his own decisions, standing on his own two feet? What if he doesn’t want to stand on his own two feet?
What if a man wants a woman to run his life for him? What if he wants her to tell him what he really wants so that he doesn’t have to think about what he really wants because thinking about what he really wants would mean having to ask for what he really wants. And who the hell wants to do that? That’s scary!
What if he has a strong need to not make decisions and a strong need to avoid conflict?
Basically, relationships meet needs. That’s why we have them. There are needs for love and companionship and sex that seem pretty normal. We get that. But what about other needs?
We’re not always meeting the needs people think we should be meeting. We’re not always meeting our most admirable needs. That doesn’t mean they’re not needs. They’re just not the needs other people think we should be meeting. And, well, duh: That’s what makes them our needs and not somebody else’s. They might be perverse and pathological needs, but they’re our needs. I know it’s sad. Doesn’t it help a little bit to look at it like this?
I hope this doesn’t make it worse. I’m just trying to help.
Why not leave him alone and wish him well? Why not just say to him that if there ever comes a time when he’s ready to bust out, you’ll be there for him.
That’s one way to look at it.
The other way to look at it is that she has put him under her spell. This happens too. People become hypnotized and lost. They become dependent on others to run their lives. They get addicted to drugs. They retreat into fantasy and it’s not entirely choice; there is a malevolent force at work.
When that happens, we can say things. We can say, you’re ruining your life. We can book a hotel room and get all his friends and family to sit on chairs and couches waiting for his arrival, and then tell him, Oh, listen, I just have to drop by here at this hotel to pick up my sister, won’t you come up there with me, and then Boom! Surprise! It’s an Intervention!
Interventions are great. When else do family and friends say what they really want and what they really feel? Interventions are terrific. The tears, the choices, the driving off to rehab!
But a pre-wedding intervention would be kinda weird. Hey, dude, we really hate your fiancée. We think she’s ruining your life. We think you should dump her.
You see the problem with that?
So here’s a thought: We act as if we have repressed our desire for happiness and that’s the problem, and if we only let it out, we would be happy. But what if we actually have the reverse situation? What if what’s actually repressed in our society is not the pursuit of happiness but true tragic consciousness? What if our overwhelming social insistence on happiness has actually driven the tragic underground, so that it is the tragic that threatens to arise out of repression, so that that it is the tragic that we seek in our intimate moments, in our private moments? And what if that is why we have these problems with drugs and suicide and depression — not because we’re not happy enough, but because we have repressed the tragic?
What if not everybody wants to visit San Diego at least once in their lives?
If that were the case, if grief were the thing most repressed in society, then we would find ways to express our melancholia, our sense of the tragic, in our intimate relations.
Another way to look at your friend’s situation is to consider the possibility that he is getting ready for something but is not ready yet. Maybe his soul is getting ready. Say a fierce battle awaits the soul. We can be in a holding pattern. There is not much to do while waiting for the soul’s great challenge. So we amuse ourselves with pastimes.
Maybe she is a pastime. Maybe he is waiting.
One thing I know: We can’t change people.
I hope this helps you accept what he’s doing so it won’t be so painful to watch. Maybe if you think about it in terms of his needs, strange as they may be, you won’t feel you’re letting him down by not interfering.
Promise to be there for him if he ever decides to leave the cage.
Dear Cary,
I have a friend that cannot speak about the president of the United States without using the word “monkey” or “chimpanzee.”
There have been presidents I was not thrilled about, but certainly I would not stoop to this.
This individual is well-off, has a degree and is considerate about most other topics.
What the HELL is his problem?
Thanks Cary,
Bewildered
Dear Bewildered,
Your friend’s problem is that he is a racist.
It’s not nice to label people. A racist may be an excellent builder of miniature racing-car models. He may be a good whistler.
But he’s still a racist. Being a racist is stupid and repugnant. What’s worse, it can spread. It’s each person’s job to not be a racist.
He can stop being a racist. You can help. You can tell him that while he may have certain racist thoughts, he can stop being a racist by not voicing any of these thoughts ever under any circumstances.
Maybe that would lead to some positive personal change. Or maybe he would give you a hurt, bewildered look of confusion and self-pity that makes you want to punch him.
Don’t punch him. That won’t help.
Well, it might help a little. It might temporarily curb his outward expressions of racism. But I’m against hitting people even as a gift of enlightenment.
Just tell him that being a racist is not cool anywhere in the United States of America or in Europe or Asia or Africa or North America or South America or Australia or Antarctica. which pretty much means the whole world, all the continents, plus the open oceans and in outer space also. Racism is not cool even in outer space or on other planets. It’s not cool, period. It’s not cool anywhere, not in public or in private. It’s one of those things that you just want to get rid of completely and be done with.
Tell your friend that the next time he says some kind of racist remark like that, that you’re terminating all contact with him.
Now, everyone has a shadow self that embodies the repressed. We all have our share of unvoiced hatred and fear, irrational beliefs, strange, criminal impulses. Thoughts come into our heads that we must censor because to voice them would disturb others.
We may have sexual fantasies about our friends’ wives or husbands, or their sisters or brothers or their children; we might have taboo curiosities. We may find ourselves imagining elaborate ways to connect physically that involve hydraulics, servo motors, pulleys and latex.
Some of us have so many of these thoughts that we move to San Francisco.
But let’s not complicate the issue.
Also, there are rumored to exist tiny protected intellectual zones where people have advanced degrees in things you never heard of and special vocabularies come into use in a specialized context, where you can say things that have several layers and degrees of irony and are understood in sophisticated ways that you couldn’t explain to your friend even if you understood them yourself, which you’re not going to.
That’s different.
There is also weird humor which unless you’re Sarah Silverman, don’t try that either. It’s too advanced for you.
And don’t get on your high horse and pretend there are degrees, that racism exists on a continuum. There are no degrees. There is no continuum.
Racism is bad. It’s evil. Nobody should be voicing racist thoughts.
If your friend keeps it up, just totally, radically de-friend him. Become his special not-friend.
Be done with it. It’s that simple.
Dear Cary,
Recently my husband of 18 years has explored his sexuality with other men. He admitted having four sexual encounters with random men he solicited from Craigslist. After a week of hell, and many a shouting match, he begged me to take him back, claiming that his experimentation is not worth losing his family. As in a textbook scenario, he, somehow, convinced himself that I, being very liberal and supportive of gay community, would understand, and maybe even approve, his urges. Having two teenage daughters and being a stay-at-home mom, I have initially agreed to let him back into the family fold, after all his STD tests came back clean.
I have immediately lined up a therapist, not being able to go through the crisis by myself. I have consulted the divorce lawyer as well, but decided that I simply cannot afford to leave him before I can secure some sort of support system, income, job, anything that would assure my landing on solid ground. Now, being middle-aged and with thin résumé, getting a job will be difficult in this economy, and I am more and more inclined to pursue separation, since staying in the marriage is not really emotionally healthy for me. I do give it a try every day, and every day is an effort, but, although he did give up his “encounters,” he still maintains virtual presence in the gay community through porn and his private Flickr account(s). Although not a deal breaker, his Internet activity makes me conclude that he is not willing to make an effort toward the true reconciliation of our relationship, and that his real orientation is something he will not be able to deny for much longer. I do realize that his orientation is not a choice, but his behavior is.
My priority is our girls, who are, hopefully, oblivious to the extent of our marital crisis, but I am asking myself lately if it is time to let him go, and hope for the best for all four of us? I do not want to hurt the girls, but I do not want to carry on with this agony for much longer either. This past couple of months have been hardest in my life, just watching everything I ever believed in crumble apart. My self-esteem is still pretty high, but self-pity creeps in every now and then, hurting my ability to think straight. I want out; the question is do I wait until the girls are off to college (another couple of years), or do I seek an exit now.
Your advice is appreciated.
Str8 Spouse
Dear Str8 Spouse,
You need concrete help. For that, you have wisely chosen a therapist and a lawyer.
What I can do is help you form a narrative or map.
Because you are human you will seek meaning in what happened. We seek meaning in misfortune whether we get cancer or have an accident or are bombed out of our houses by unseen jets. It helps. It helps to make a story out of what happens.
Your story will be something like this. You fell in love and got married and had two beautiful children and had always thought there might be unexplored territory between you and your husband. But you did not go there. You may have learned a way of relating that, though intimate, allowed for certain unexplored regions. You may have termed this privacy, or given it some meaning. But you sensed that your husband was not completely transparent to you, that he had secrets or evasions. Having no clear guidelines, you let these areas, and perhaps these doubts, go unexplored. You didn’t press the issue. You made small incremental decisions that maintained the relationship and the family.
It may be that at the first you wondered if this was the way it was supposed to be. You may have talked to your friends about it, subtly suggesting that things were “good” but not “great,” that you wondered sometimes …
Maybe. Maybe not. I think it likely, if you are honest, that you had vague suspicions.
At any rate, now it has become clear that your husband has been hiding a great deal from you. So you are incensed, enraged, hurt, betrayed. You’ve had a terrible shock. Gone are the bedrock vows and beliefs on which your marriage rested. You are now in the sticky muck of uncertainty. It is hard to walk now; everything is harder.
For a while it’s going to be one day at a time, slogging through, some days better than others. You will have to decide if you can continue living with him and for how long, and under what circumstances, and for those decisions, you have help through a lawyer and a therapist. One way or another you will arrive in a future that was not the future you imagined.
What do I see for you in the future? I see a wiser woman; I see a woman who finds new strength in herself to protect her daughters and make a new life. I see a woman who now knows you never really know, who learns that when disaster happens you’re capable of more than you realized. And maybe there will be some new rules in this story — rules about hunches and doubts, a rule that says if something doesn’t feel right, it isn’t.
We are educated to be sensible and quasi-scientific in our decisions. In the conscious realm we operate on what we can see and hear. But in the unconscious realm, the animal realm, the realm of hunches and doubts, we need to listen more carefully to unformed notions we don’t fully understand and yet which persist, in their way, in their language of symbols and doubts and strange coincidence.
I wish to leave you with this: You are not alone. This has happened before. You have strength and support to call on. You can get through this and be stronger and wiser. You have help. You have people who love you and are on your side. You are going to be OK.
Dear Cary,
I don’t know how to put this any way but bluntly, so here goes. My mom let me and my brother breast-feed really, really late– until we were 4 or 5. She let us touch and play with her breasts for years after that. She never told us what sex was, and later when I found out for myself, my body changing on its own, I felt revulsion at the all-too-recent memories of how I touched, and wanted to touch, my own mother. I hated that she hadn’t stopped me.
Now I’m 18 and have a little sister. Just like with me and my older brother, Mom breast-fed her really late, and now at 9 years old, my sister still likes to feel my mother’s breasts. My sister is my mom’s last child, and so in several areas Mom persists in regarding her as a baby.
I try to understand my mom. I realize the idea of her last kid growing up must be scary and depressing. But this behavior is disgusting to watch or even to know it is going on when you’re not there. Additionally, it’s delusional and perverse to excuse, and even encourage, such behavior in a growing young woman on the grounds that she’s an infant. Who knows why I wanted, and now my sister wants, to touch my mother’s breasts at age 9? Certainly not because we wanted to breast-feed. But Mom’s so convinced of my sister’s innocence that she refuses to consider she could be encouraging inappropriate impulses that my sister is too unaware to understand.
I know those impulses are there. It happened to me. But for obvious reasons, I can’t tell my mother that.
What I do tell her? That I’m grossed out and that my sister is too old? Mom won’t listen. My sister, of course, listens to Mom over me and gets mad at me for saying anything. So I’m at a loss for what to do, and I don’t want my sister to turn out with the revulsion of her own memories and the confusion of her feelings that I suffered.
I’m so disgusted it’s keeping me up at night. I’m angry and stressed.
What should I do?
Revolted
Dear Revolted,
I want you to consult with a psychotherapist. Look for someone who has helped others with experiences similar to yours.
You could read and study about this. It wouldn’t hurt to get a basic understanding of child development and how such experiences can later affect us in troubling and unexpected ways. But knowledge alone will not be enough to avoid the later effects of this early experience.
The best thing you can do for yourself now is to find a therapist who can respond to you in a clear, responsible and nonjudgmental way and sit with you, week after week, as you tell your story. That would also be the best person to advise you on how to talk with your mom and your sister should you choose to do so at some point.
You are in a great situation right now. You know what happened, and it is still fresh. You have not distorted what happened or rationalized it or put it out of your mind. So this is the time to act.
You will meet obstacles in your search for the right psychotherapist. So consider this a quest of monumental importance. It may be the most important thing you ever do — more important than your education or your later occupation.
Feelings of guilt and self-hatred may arise. As such feelings come up, remind yourself that they are not helpful. They are, in fact, the direct result of this experience that has left you feeling troubled and conflicted.
You may also hear voices telling you that talking about it is taboo or will expose others to harm. That is why the confidential setting of a psychotherapist’s office is the ideal space in which to tell your story. You will not be “outing” your mother or have to confront her; you will not be causing family conflict. All you will be doing in therapy is resuming, as a slightly older person, the course of development that was sidetracked at an early age by these unusual experiences.
You have the chance to live a happy, productive life, unburdened by this. Moreover, once you attain some understanding of this, you can be of use to others who have had similar experiences.
Now, I believe that a rich country like ours ought to provide for its people in certain basic ways. One of these ways is in medical care. Psychotherapy is a kind of medical care. So I believe that high-quality psychotherapy and psychiatric care ought to be readily available to people of all income levels.
This is not currently the case in America. Instead, we must be creative, energetic and insistent to get the care we need. This is cruelly paradoxical, because it is precisely at moments when we are most burdened that we are called upon to be entrepreneurial and creative in our search for care.
You will need strength and resilience as you search for the right therapist. To keep on your quest you may need to repeat to yourself that this is indeed a life-or-death matter. People who have such experiences can later fall into depression, suicide and addiction. We don’t want that to happen to you.
Some people are uncomfortable with this topic, so they snicker and make childish jokes. Beware of shaming remarks. It would be great if they could just slide off your back, but the truth is that such remarks often do sting. Do not pretend that such remarks are not hurtful. Instead, feel the sting and wait for it to subside, like the sting of a bee. Accept that the world has many cruel and ignorant people in it, but you can survive and live a happy life.
Don’t listen to anyone who says to just get over it. We humans don’t often just “get over” stuff like this. Not without help. So get help.
You can find the help you need, and you deserve it. It’s not your fault what happened when you were just a kid.
More Cary Tennis.
(Credit: Zach Trenholm/Salon) 
