My last blog post brought back a lot of memories. Among those memories were all of the different affairs that my parents both had, and how they tried to involve me in them to various degrees.
When I was about 10 years old, I was using the family computer and accidentally stumbled upon my dad's accounts on websites for people to find affair partners. I was horrified and told my mom. When she talked to him about it, he came up with a ridiculous excuse - "my friend has me run his accounts on those websites so his girlfriend doesn't find out about them". Somehow, my mom claimed to believe this nonsensical excuse, and it was thrown into the bin of "things that are not to be brought up unless you want to get dirty looks".
I had one big problem with this excuse - if it was true, which it wasn't, why wouldn't it be alarming that her husband is participating in such an evil scheme? My husband would never do such a thing, but if I was married to someone who did, I'd be absolutely horrified. I don't think I could ever trust them after finding out that they were willing to cover up someone else's infidelity. However, in the world of mentally ill abusers, this is all normal. Everything goes as long as the wrong people don't find out about it.
My dad also had a severe addiction to extreme forms of pornography, another thing I'd repeatedly stumble upon when I tried to play games or check my children's cartoon websites on the family computer. I'm not talking "curious young man looks up pretty naked ladies" stuff, I mean really depraved fetish content which was often outright illegal. To me, this is a form of infidelity, and goes to show just how bad of a person he was. It obviously bothered my mom, but it was another "you're the bad guy if you bring it up" situation. I was always at fault for accidentally stumbling upon it, and he didn't really have any shame storing illegal rape and torture videos out in the open on the computer that was for all of us to use. I'm omitting a lot of more direct abuse towards me related to his pornography addiction, just to stay on the topic of their infidelity to each other.
I have a specific memory of my mom's infidelity. On my first day of 6th grade, which was at an arts themed middle and high school across town, I came home feeling absolutely miserable and drained. I just wanted to talk about it with my mom. However, she was out with her boyfriend, who she called Boney M, because he was Jamaican and there's a song by the group Boney M called "Jamaica". I remember calling her crying that I just wanted her to come home and be with me. She called me needy, and was obviously frustrated that I dared to interrupt her time with this man.
I remember spending a couple of years very resentful of this Boney M character. I really hated him. I knew that what my mom was doing was wrong, but I also felt like he was just another man that my mom put ahead of me in her list of priorities. He was pretty mentally ill in his own right, and my mom could never quite figure out if he was married or not. She wanted him to be my step-dad, and also wanted to obtain a green card by marrying him. I think that he was probably just a player who was more than likely married, but had a few women like my mom around for entertainment. She was always really upset if her boyfriends were married or had girlfriends, despite, you know, being married herself.
Without getting into my dad's sexual abuse towards me too much in this post, there was another incident where she was out with a boyfriend (I don't even remember which one at this point), and my dad came into my room, drunk to the point of slurring his words, and tried to talk to me about sex and porn, and how I'm supposed to sexually please men. I could have been about 12 years old at the time. I remember crying, asking him to leave, and ultimately calling my mom for help. She made it clear that I was bothering her, she half-assedly asked my dad to stop on speakerphone, and there was no obvious sense of urgency for her. She came home many hours later and acted like she did everything she could have done to stop what happened. It took my dad hours to leave my room. I remember feeling an immense sense of dread and panic the entire time.
When I was a bit older, maybe about 14 years old, she got another boyfriend. We called him Sweatpants, because her code for going to visit him around my dad was "I'm going to go to the store and buy some sweatpants". She used to take me to visit him all of the time. I was uncomfortable with it, but it wasn't until I remembered it as an adult that I realized just how screwed up it was for her to repeatedly bring me around an affair partner. She was never quite sure if Sweatpants was married or not, either, but his story was that he lived in our city because his wife kicked him out and divorced him for cheating on her. This one didn't last as long as Boney M, although her time with Sweatpants overlapped with Boney M to a large degree - go figure.
Her last noteworthy "boyfriend" was a man whom I'll call Herbert. We never really had a nickname for him, and I don't feel comfortable using any real legal names on this blog. Herbert was the least "boyfriendy" of the boyfriends, although their relationship was the most complex and weird to me. He and my mom met at a store she cleaned when we had just moved to the United States. So he was in my life from my early childhood to my late teen years. They had a strange co-dependent relationship which I believed was partly romantic and sexual. Herbert was definitely married, and when his wife found out about my mom, he wanted my mom to lie about her identity over the phone. Him and his wife were very on-and-off, and he strung my mom along a lot, claiming that he'd divorce his wife and marry my mom for papers. She'd tell me about how he'd pester her for sex.
Herbert was the only one that actually bothered my dad, and I'm pretty sure this was because he was the only one my dad actually knew enough about to suspect something. My mom would invite Herbert over when my dad wasn't home and serve him lunch, and they would often be on the phone for hours almost every day, for over a decade. Eventually, Herbert found someone for my mom to marry for papers. She divorced my dad and married this man, and I'm not sure of the extent of the actual marriage. He ended up being a serial felon who was ineligible to sponsor an immigrant, so they divorced, and my mom married my dad again several years later. I'll write a whole post about that saga, one day...
With most of my mom's boyfriends, I was instructed to not tell my dad about them. Perhaps, if I felt that my dad was a good person who deserved better, I would have told on her. For a very long time, I empathized with my mom and I wasn't fully aware of the extent of her immorality and mental issues, and I felt like she was definitely the better of my two parents, so I often told her about my dad's infidelity. This is a common theme with people that grow up in dysfunctional homes, where both parents are essentially as bad as each other - the mother is given more lenience and sympathy for her actions, and the father is automatically seen as the worse one.
Each time that one of these situations came up, it caused a little bit of drama for a couple of days at most, but then it died down and you were the bad guy if you ever brought it up. I remember being a preteen and my mom crying in my room about how human beings aren't monogamous, and how a woman's "true love" is supposed to be her child. She told me that men are only for giving a woman a child, and then the child was supposed to be the center of her universe. We don't talk anymore - what a "true love" and "center of her universe" I was. Not that I'd ever want to be those things to her, but it just goes to show how fleeting and shallow everything they say is.
When I was in middle school, two boys liked me. My mom told me to date both of them, as long as they didn't find out about each other. She saw no problem with this, and I thought it was pretty gross even as a mush-brained teenager. Many years later, I had my first long-term relationship, with a man I didn't know had a severe pornography addiction and even cheated on me. "Ha, so you didn't know?" was her only response - there are several layers to this, from the obvious malice and lack of care towards her own child, to the normalization of infidelity in what's supposed to be a monogamous relationship. I also think there was some bitterness about the fact that I always said "if a man ever did those things to me, it's an automatic divorce". She wanted me to eat my words - and I didn't, I left. For years after, she resented me for leaving him instead of staying like a good, traditional Slavic woman is supposed to in her eyes.
My mom grew up seeing infidelity in her parents' marriage, but I don't know about my dad's parents. I don't play "abloobloobloo, they had a rough childhood too!" - it doesn't matter, everyone needs to do better and break harmful cycles, it's no excuse. Instead of reflecting on her parents' decisions and choosing a better life for herself, she chose to pretend that it's all good and normal. My paternal grandpa was a severe alcoholic, and would regularly kick my mom and my maternal grandma out of the house so he could bring home prostitutes. My mom told me stories of hearing him have sex with prostitutes through the walls when she was trying to sleep in her room. He even fathered a bastard child with one of his mistresses - my mom and maternal grandma chose to hate the mistress and child, instead of the man who sought out an affair.
My maternal grandma would travel to Yugoslavia to have affairs of her own. When my mom was small, one of my grandma's affair partners sent her a postcard in the mail. My mom tried to show it to my grandpa to warn him of what was going on, and instead of him directing his anger at his adult spouse who made a decision to be unfaithful to him, he got aggressive with my mom. She clearly got the message of "this behavior is fine as long as I don't know about it". My grandma would also have overly flirtatious relationships with male friends and coworkers, which is also incredibly inappropriate, but was normalized in their family.
This part is really embarrassing - when I was about 10 years old, I accidentally found a porn website on the internet run by a couple who slept with other people. I was horrified. I remember sending them a message about how what they're doing is wrong, and how if they're married, they should only be doing that with their spouse. The reason I'm sharing this story, which makes me cringe as I type it, is because despite my upbringing, I didn't think this kind of behavior was normal or acceptable. This is why I don't really care that my parents grew up around infidelity - that doesn't make it right, and it leads me to think that their own flaws, lack of basic morals, and disordered thinking are at fault here.
There are a few more things I could share, maybe in separate blog posts in the future. Lo and behold, at the age of 26 - I'm in a normal marriage, the kind they call a "Hollywood marriage", which they think only exists on TV, but actually represents a vast majority of marriages in most cultures.
No comments:
Post a Comment