Sometimes, loved ones hurt you in such a devastating way that it’s hard to believe that’s how your life turned out. How would you feel if you found out your spouse was cheating on you with your parent?
This 24-year-old girl spent five years married to her 25-year-old husband, and they tied the knot super young. They have two children together, a four-year-old daughter and a two-year-old son.
While they were married, she held their family together. She worked a part-time job, cared for their children, did the household chores, dealt with school matters, made appointments, and shopped for groceries.
Her husband had a lot of problems. For instance, he couldn’t hold down a job, drank to excess, and blew money on sports betting and gambling.
She thought she could love and support him through his issues and that things would one day improve as he grew older and matured.
“Around a year ago, things got really stressful because he lost another job. I started picking up more hours just to keep us afloat. Around that same time, my mom (42F) started coming over more often to ‘help with the kids’ while I was working,” she explained.
“I trusted both of them completely. Then one day I came home early from work and caught them together in our house. At first, they tried to deny it, but eventually admitted they had been having an affair for months.”
“I was completely destroyed. I kicked my husband out that night and cut off contact with my mom. I felt like the two people I trusted most had betrayed me at the same time. But somehow the situation got even worse.”
Several months after she walked in on her mom and her husband, her mom informed her that she was pregnant with her husband’s baby!
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So, the affair had been happening for longer than she thought it had. She instantly filed for divorce and invested her time and energy into her children.
Some of her family members backed her up, while others insisted she should find it in her heart to forgive her mom and her husband for the sake of not breaking up the family.
She hardly said anything to her husband for nearly a year. He began therapy, quit drinking, and found a stable job. He asked if he could hang out with her and their kids, and they began chatting more when doing their custody exchanges.
“Over time, he apologized a lot and admitted how badly he had messed up. He said the affair was the worst mistake of his life and that he hated himself for hurting me and destroying my relationship with my mom,” she added.
“Slowly, somehow, we started reconnecting. We went to counseling together and tried to rebuild trust. Now we’re not remarried, but we are back together and living in the same house again while trying to rebuild our family.”
“My mom had the baby and moved away. I still don’t talk to her. A lot of people in my life think I’m absolutely crazy for giving him another chance after everything that happened. They say cheating is bad enough, but cheating with my own mom and having a baby with her should be unforgivable.”
She does partially believe that, but she has a stronger pull towards thinking that people can change for the better, and that her husband has.
Also, she desperately wants her children to grow up with their dad in their lives since he is a good influence on them after getting the help he needed.
She’s left wondering if she’s wrong to take her husband back, considering he cheated on her with her own mom and knocked her up.
There is no roadmap or handbook for what she’s been through. The changes her husband made are real, measurable, and seem to be sticking.
People are capable of change, and sometimes the most genuinely transformed people are the ones who have had to hit that ugly rock bottom before building their way back up.
Forgiving her husband and rebuilding a life with him after something this incomprehensibly gross is a tremendous leap of faith, and only she can decide if the man he is now is worth the risk. What’s notably absent is any real reconciliation with her mom, and that silence speaks volumes to me.
What do you think?
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By Bre Avery Zacharski
Hi, I'm Bre, Chip Chick's CEO! I have a degree in Textile/Surface Design from The Fashion Institute of Technology, and... More about Bre Avery Zacharski
