Tale of Two Infidelities
Serial cheating by my mother and stepmother
My father was married to serial cheaters.
The first time my stepmother cheated, she was 19 and they’d been married less than a year. Bear in mind, my father was 29, on his second marriage, she, her first. And to top it off, my real mother had cheated too. The year was 1976.
You may be asking, why did both women cheat? I have my theories.
In my mother’s case, she was a feminist from Holland. In 1965, after four months of dating my father, she got pregnant. They married, had my older brother in 1966, and my mother somehow could not have predicted that my Italian father was the type of man who thought she would stay home to “cook, clean, and raise babies” while he went out drinking with his goombas. He was not carousing; he just loved to drink, tell stories, and shoot craps.
My mother was lonely, overwhelmed, and quite frankly, pissed off. She stopped taking the pill to become pregnant again (thanks, Mom, because here I am), but cute little me couldn’t keep my father home either. So, my mother left my brother and me with sitters and went out too. She was far too beautiful not to get hit on, and, of course, lonely, so she hooked up. When my father found out she had been leaving us to go out, and that she cheated, he was done. After three years of marriage, he filed for divorce and sought full custody. (I didn’t even meet her until I was 24. But that’s another post.)
My stepmother was a whole other story. Her cheating was based on trauma. There was sexual abuse at the hands of her father from a very young age. There was abandonment, also by her father. Emotional abuse by her mother. With no therapy, self-awareness, or openness about the abuse, she never had a chance.
Similar to my mother, my stepmother became pregnant by my father and they got married. When my younger brother was just a baby, my father was on a bowling league — still not the man to stay home and have quiet evenings. We had an upstairs tenant at the time, also on the bowling league. My father noticed that said tenant started skipping league night.
Being the street wise man he was, my father pretended to leave for bowling one Wednesday night. Drove around the corner and waited. After 15 minutes or so, he walked from his car to his house, up to the tenant’s apartment, and found his 19-year-old wife getting laid while their baby lay sleeping in his crib downstairs.
Here is the story my father told me, “I grabbed that guy by the skin of his neck and dragged him into his bathroom. I showed him his face in the mirror and said, ‘You see this face? If you don’t get your shit and leave by morning, this face is gonna look a lot less pretty.’” By the time my father left for work the next day, the upstairs apartment and carport were empty.
Here’s the wrinkle. Because my father was only 22 when he divorced my mother for cheating, he felt guilty. He desperately wanted my older brother and me to have a mother figure, so he decided to stay married to our stepmother. She beat us, emotionally abused us, and cheated on our father all 23 years of their marriage. (He finally gave up in 1998). Years later, my father admitted to me he never forgave her for that first affair.
I am a stout believer in therapy. I’ve been in therapy since I was 22, and I still see a therapist at 53. My father thought therapy was for the weak. He stayed married to a woman who believed her only value to the world was through fucking. Her father was a monster who raped her when she was five. She ruined our lives. Her father ruined hers. Trauma, as you probably know, is cyclical.
But let’s end on a happier note. As young as age nine, I knew something was wrong with my stepmother. I became obsessed with reading and writing. I wanted to go to college, get out of my hometown, learn about the world. Education saved me.
She lives in Florida. I live in the Pacific northwest. I have not spoken to her since 1998. My father and older brother are dead, sadly. My younger brother and I still talk, still love each other. And my writing helps me process the abuse she inflicted, even if she had no idea why she was inflicting.
Infidelity has so many shapes. As much as it bothers me to admit this, my own infidelity in marriage has to have been shaped by what I saw as a child. I will continue to write about this. Onward and upward, folks.
