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Published: 01:13 GMT, 15 November 2014 | Updated: 01:13 GMT, 15 November 2014Why are you waiting to begin your life?
Do you think the world must care and come soliciting?
Listen to the knocking at the door of your own heart -
It is only faint because you have not answered...
Judith Gass (American psychotherapist and poet)
DEAR BEL
Two years ago I had an affair — discovered by my husband. We tried to mend the marriage, going to a counsellor together and separately.
I’m still going, trying to find a way either to live in my broken marriage or have the courage to leave. Either option looks like hell.
I want to stay married mainly because we have three wonderful teenagers and can’t bear to see their lives blown apart. My husband says he loves me but cannot live with someone who has betrayed him.
He won’t leave as he doesn’t want to hurt the children but says he will leave when they’re grown up. I’ll then be in my mid-fifties and will I want to start again?
Throughout our marriage my husband has regularly smashed things, sulked and ignored me for months. I wanted to leave when the children were small but my courage failed.
'I want to stay married mainly because we have three wonderful teenagers and can’t bear to see their lives blown apart. My husband says he loves me but cannot live with someone who has betrayed him' A friend once said ‘He treats you as if he despises you.’ Yet he is also funny, generous and a fantastic dad and I do love him. He punishes me all the time — ignoring me and excluding me from activities with the children. We have told them we’re separating but neither of us does anything as we cannot face breaking the family up.
I feel I’m wasting my life. He makes me feel small, lonely and marginalised.
The stupid thing is, I did this to myself and am punishing myself as a result. Because I love my children so much, I don’t leave. My husband has threatened to tell them I had an affair and I couldn’t bear them to hate me. I couldn’t face taking them to rented accommodation and seeing them sad because of me.
We are both in constant turmoil and two weeks ago once more made a decision to separate. Since then he’s been nice to me, so I am thinking — shall we give it another try for the sake of the children?
I asked him and he says he has given up thinking about that, but will just hang about for ten years. This is mental torture.
Over the past two years I have tried SO hard. I drink too much and cry nearly all the time.
Shall I stay, enabling my children’s lives to be uninterrupted and happy? Or leave, making them hate me and carry their parents’ divorce forever? Please help. I can’t find a way.
ANNA
There is much cruelty in this sad story — an old-fashioned tale of sin and retribution.
Your longer letter reveals that you are truly tortured by ‘crushing guilt’ at your infidelity, which happened because your husband hadn’t spoken to you for three months and the other man was ‘so kind’. That said, anybody can understand your husband’s hurt and fury when he found out.
But no one will persuade me that a life sentence of misery is a fitting punishment for a fling.
Nobody likes to be betrayed — but either forgive (although we never forget) and move on, or end the marriage.
What you two have settled for is an entirely unsustainable situation, without honesty or genuine love or care for your children’s welfare. Most of all, without courage or maturity.
Let me spell it out. The pair of you have already ‘broken the family up’ as surely as your husband smashed things in his famous tempers.
You deceive yourself that by continuing with this terrible stalemate you are ensuring that your children’s lives are ‘uninterrupted and happy’.
How can that possibly be, when you have already shattered their stability by talking of separation and made them unhappy by the terrible atmosphere at home?
I used to believe that parents should do all they can to stay together ‘for the sake of the children’ but now I am not so sure.
The children of parents with severe relationship issues suffer terribly and the effects can last a lifetime – as bad or worse than a divorce in the family.
One study found that children raised in an atmosphere of marital hostility have seriously elevated levels of stress hormones, which show in behaviour and in school results.
I warn you that by continuing in this situation of mutually-assured destruction you and your husband are storing up problems for the children you profess to love so much.
Your husband says he will stay for ten years until they have grown, settling for a decade of misery. You say you ‘love’ him (really?) yet long for a new start with somebody who might display loving kindness to you. He threatens to tell your children about the affair. What loving Dad would make such a wicked threat?
You might consider telling him quietly that you will sit down with them yourself and have a proper talk about how your marriage went wrong. That might take the wind out of his sails.
The whole thing is unbearable — and since you have tried counselling and failed, surely you have to call time on this unhappy marriage?
I think you should take advice (try National Family Mediation) on how to work out the ramifications of a separation in terms of the home. I am no legal expert (the NFM people are) but I’m thinking that a court might deem it better for you to remain in the marital home with the children.
It seems to me that in this matter the moral guilt is shared. You may have sinned but the implacable retribution is your husband’s responsibility and it cannot continue.
The man I love is tormented by guilt
DEAR BEL,
Twenty years ago, I was widowed at 38 and brought up my sons on my own, with help from my mum. Then I cared for her at home until she died seven years ago aged 90.
I thought I was destined to spend the rest of my life alone. Then, two years ago, I met a neighbour — and we have spent the last two years getting to know each other. We now love each other very much.
We’ve spoken about moving in together but Tom still lives with his 34-year-old son.
Tom’s wife died six years ago from alcoholism. Although she made his life a misery, he feels he should have done more to help her and visits her grave regularly.
He feels responsible that his son doesn’t drive and works supermarket nights with no hope of ever being able to move out. (His daughter lives with her boyfriend, and has a good job.)
Tom says he can’t leave his son because he wouldn’t be able to look after himself properly. He takes him to work every evening and collects him in the mornings too, on his days off.
He wants me to be patient and wait (maybe a year) but I don’t know what to do. I do love him and don’t want to lose him, but I thought we’d be together by now, instead of having a couple of hours in the afternoon before he has to go home and cook dinner.
I feel I need more, but don’t want to try to make him do something he’s not ready for. He is so kind and good. Am I unreasonable and should I just be happy to carry on as we are?
SUSAN
Let us look at the issue from the outside. Surely the welfare of both these men is at stake? The father is being a masochist in sacrificing his chance of happiness while the 34-year-old has no hope of changing and developing a life of his own if his over-protective father keeps him in a state of infancy.
I find your description of Tom ferrying his adult son about and cooking all his meals quite shocking. Objectively it is quite hard to respect either man. Certainly you are not ‘unreasonable’ to find the scenario unhealthy as well as threatening to your own future happiness.
Had you said the man-child is afflicted by a mental or physical illness the situation would be different. But somebody needs to ask Tom what on earth he thinks he is doing — colluding with his son to keep him imprisoned, effectively, in the family home, with no hope of growing muscles mature enough to break out of the cage?
This, by the way, is not a matter of money — although a recent study has shown that a record 3.3 million 20 to 34-year-olds live with their parents and another half-million aged 35 to 64 are also living in their family home, often still sleeping in their childhood bedroom.
Sometimes there are good reasons — yet your letter underlines how important it is for every single parent to prepare offspring for life. To teach them to accept shared responsibility within the home: cooking and cleaning and contributing in every way possible.
I wonder if Tom actually needs his son to be so dependent — as if somehow it assuages his guilt at feeling (probably irrationally) that he let his troubled wife down.
The son and daughter must have witnessed horrible scenes, and yet the daughter turned out fine. I wonder why? Have you discussed this with Tom? Does she visit and have you met her? She might be a good ally for you — as I can’t imagine that she approves of her brother sponging off Dad.
A loving sister and father would, above all, want this young man to start to make something of his life. For example, were Tom to move into your house, the son ought to be able to live alone (maybe taking a lodger to help pay bills) like any other 34-year-old.
What does Tom want you to wait for? A change in the wind? He should give his son driving lessons for Christmas, with the promise of a cheap car when he passes the test. He should also start teaching him a repertoire of simple dishes, and expect them to be practised.
Ask him to look forward: in 20 years time, when he’s in his 70s and the son is 54, will he still be acting as a skivvy? He must see how pathetic that would be. Since you value Tom so much you should point out that he is not being kind to his son or to you or to himself.
Tell him — with loving firmness — that 2015 must see a new start. That you will help with the cookery lessons, but that by Easter you expect him to come and live with you — or let the son live in your house (if it is smaller, say) while you move across the road. This is the only way forward.
And finally... Don't sneer at the joy of childhood
Sometimes I feel so out of step with my peers — but then, I cry at Toy Story 3 so there’s no hope for me.
This year’s tender John Lewis advertisement is about a penguin called Monty and the little boy who owns him and feeds him a fish finger at teatime. It’s as soppy as any Christmas ad should be, and more fun than the Aldi one, which pans along carousing people and ends with Jools Holland abandoning all claims to be cool.
A penguin should be ‘cool’ but it’s not: Monty is warm and wants a partner — as you do, humans and animals alike. But I’ve seen one writer express horror at the idea of a live penguin being kept in captivity as a pet. Yes, really!
Bel answers readers’ questions on emotional and relationship problems each week.
Write to: Bel Mooney, Daily Mail, 2 Derry Street, London W8 5TT, or e-mail bel.mooney@dailymail.co.uk.
A pseudonym will be used if you wish.
Bel reads all letters, but regrets she cannot enter into personal correspondence.
Another sneers that ‘once again, I’m dry-eyed. Some stupid penguin wants to cop off with another stupid penguin . . .’
Others (yawn) moan about the price of penguin toys in the stores.
Shall we break it to those unimaginative nay-sayers? This isn’t supposed to be taken seriously! It’s not about a real penguin! This is a little story!
Monty the penguin is alive in the boy’s imagination — as we see at the end when there’s a girl penguin under the tree, a companion for the first.
We realise that his parents knew his dreams — and were happy to buy their son another fluffy toy to feed his heart rather than an electronic toy to exercise his thumbs. Hooray!
Human beings have always thrived through story-telling. Fairy and folk tales, myths, legend . . . all of them use metaphor to plant seeds within the imagination. They close the gap between unlike parts of our experience and whisper, ‘This is how you could be transformed.’
Storytelling looks for meaning under the surface of things and heals at a deep level because it offers hope and compassion, too.
That’s why one of the most precious experiences for children is a bedtime book with an adult who loves stories and also shares the imaginative certainty that the beloved toy IS real and understands what you say.
Lessons in kindness start right there.
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