A EUREKA MOMENT
Can you remember the incredible power of a mummy’s kiss when your kids were little?
One of my daughters spent a lot of her childhood running around barefoot, so needless to say there were lots of sore toes. But in those days, I had incredible power. No matter how badly she stubbed it, a kiss from me was able to make it all better, the tears dried up and she was back outside. When adults hurt, who do they go to? Ideally, a husband and wife should go to each other to talk about the issue and work out a solution together. It is a discussion between two equal adults, each playing an equal role.
Things changed, however, when Tom started to go through some sort of mid life crisis brought on by a number of factors such as extreme stress at work, a falling libido, an increasing self-inflicted alienation from me and a physical attraction to a modern Molly Malone, cart and all, and just as I used to kiss my daughter’s toes to make all the pain go away, she promised to make it all better for him. She did momentarily make him feel better, but those moments came at a terrible cost. Each high came at the cost of ever deepening lows that eventually even threatened his sanity.
This was followed by my confrontation and Tom suddenly could not run away to Molly for a temporary fix. Instead, for the first time he had to face up to the enormity of what he had done.
As part of that facing up, we went to see a counsellor and she asked me about the responsibility I took for the chasm between us that Molly was able to take advantage of. We agreed that part of the problem was the fact that I attacked his self-esteem as I insisted that he went to see a doctor with regards to his libido issues. Whilst it seemed to satisfy the counsellor, I was never fully convinced that we had got to the bottom of the issue, so it is something that has kept nagging away at me. Recently, I have been reading an inspirational reading every day that specifically deals with co-dependence, but actually got me to think about general life issues, but in particular what role I played in Tom’s affair.
As I said previously, I had picked up the clues, but did not put them together and it has occurred to me that may have been a subconscious choice of mine. If we go back to my daughter and her sore toes. Imagine if she was really frustrated at something and keeps kicking it. If she keeps coming to me and I keep kissing her toes, I become complicit in her frustration. I am the adult, therefore, I must step back and work out what is wrong and help her work out her frustration.
Another example might be when your teenager over spends their allowance and you the parent keep bailing them out. The idea of giving a child an allowance is to teach them responsibility, how to budget, how to prioritize and how to think ahead, which are all wonderful life skills. If we as parents keep topping up and helping out, we actually make the situation worse than if there was no allowance and we paid out for every request. I want to know who was complicit in the decision to have the affair.
I will accept that I was complicit to some extent. I knew something really strange was happening and I did not investigate. I was complicit as over the weekend initially, I would make a plan to do something else in the afternoon, which helped me avoid feeling abandoned after he set off for gym and to visit her. I was complicit when I sub-consciously went to bed after him, so that I did not have to feel neglected at the lack of affection. I was complicit when Tom kept coming home later and later on a Friday evening when we traditionally went out for a family dinner, so I started cooking instead and we ate without him. His behavior and his manners became despicable. We would not accept that behavior from our children who are good at telling us when they are going to be home and that may be partially due to the wonderful example that Tom used to set, though that made his subsequent volte face even harder to understand.
However, the way I am most complicit is that I knew long before he even realised that she intended to go after him. In my heart of hearts, I knew what she was planning for over a year before it happened, but I said nothing to him. If I had said anything about it, he would have denied it, though at least I might have had the vicarious pleasure of being right when the truth came out.
Where do you cross the line between being complicit and actually enabling the wrongdoing? I suspect few times I may have crossed especially when I made excuses for him to the kids. I remember one conversation when one child moaned “I thought Sunday was our family day”. I made excuses and I did not take the issue up with Tom. I enabled his hurtful behavior. Because I did not hold him accountable for his neglect of the children, I enabled that neglect.
We can look at Tom and Molly’s behaviour and decide who was worst. But it is not an exam and there is no marking guidelines. Tom and I owed responsibility and accountability to our kids, but not Molly. Molly knew exactly what she was getting, an affair, a fuck buddy arrangement. She knew she would not see him in the evening, unless I had something on and then often she would have had to drop whatever else she was doing to see Tom. She also was lied to. When Tom told her he had fallen in love with her, he omitted to say that he still loves his wife. When he had sex with her, he did not mention the times he made love to me. When he said he would not leave the marriage because of his children, he did not explain about those invisible ties to me.
We all lied to ourselves and none of us stepped back and tried to understand the whole picture and what was going on exactly. Through musings like this, I believe I have learnt the most of the 3 of us. Initially I read a lot of books and articles about affairs, but more recently I have been reading about co-dependency which is not meant for infidelity, but for the families of alcoholics, drug addicts and other addictions. (Incidentally, I found the infidelity literature only useful for the first year of recovery.)
So in my search for healing, I have picking up help from all sorts of areas and it has helped me grow. One of the things I have always done to avoid been overly judgemental is think about the person as if they were my child and this is what I did with Molly. Molly is my age, early 50’s, but never mind. We can call it poetic license. Molly was married to an alcoholic for 15 plus years. The final straw was when they went into business together and lost everything. So all she could do was take her teenage daughter and start her life again. She got herself a job and provided for her daughter as so many mummies do and we have to admire her for that. However, not long after she started work she picked up another lame duck to nurture and care for. For over 7 years, they had an off and on again affair. Then eventually his wife threw down the gauntlet and that came to an end. So when Molly met my husband she was in desperate need of her next fix of nurturing. Anyone notice a pattern here? Before she was 50, she had wasted half her life on looking after men who were damaged at the time.
I can look at her as if she was my daughter and see the pattern. But she is not my daughter, so instead I will call her Molly Malone, a character from a nursery rhyme, who is immortalized on the streets of Dublin in a statue of a young Victorian girl, who is trapped for ever pushing her cart of cockles and mussels. The modern Molly is also trapped in a pattern of doomed relationships and each one adds more and more rocks to her overflowing cart. We can see as an adult that she should put down that cart, carefully unpack it and try to learn life lessons. But no, the modern Molly will carry on pushing her overladen cart from doomed relationship to doomed relationship and will ask herself “why does this always happen to me?” The answer, Molly, is that it will keep happening until you find the mental strength to step back and see the pattern for yourself.
I tried once to give Molly a chance to explain herself and for me to explain the damage her affair did to me, Tom and my family. It seemed important at the time to try to get her to see the harm in her choices, so that she never put another family through the same heartache. She did not give me the opportunity and perhaps that is just as well. What I would have said then to what I now understand are very different. People have to learn their own lessons and we have to give them the freedom they need to work out their own salvation.
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