Years ago when I was getting ready to graduate high school my friend had a group of us over to catch up before we all went on our way to our next chapters. While we were hanging out and remembering the concerts we went to and the fun times we had over the last few years, my friend's mother blurts out that she had an affair with my friends ex-boyfriend... like the boyfriend my friend had when she was 15. I couldn't believe what I had just heard. She must have been in her 40's and he was a teenager. Apparently she had already confessed this to my friend because she just shrugged it off while the rest of us were dumbfounded.
A little back story on this ex boyfriend, he was not a good guy. He was a true asshole, he pushed around my friend mentally, physically and sexually. She had to end their relationship with a restraining order of protection and eventually chose to move out of the house. Their backyards touched so he had a lot of access to her house. I met my friend at the end of their relationship so I never knew him personally but he was a big, stocky, metal head with long stringy light brown hair and thick glasses. He always wore motorcycle boots, jeans, a metal band t-shirt and his black motorcycle jacket.
Her mother had an abrupt personality. She was real, like she didn't sugarcoat anything. She wore her hair in a auburn pixie and she was fairly cool as far as Mom's go. When I met them, she had just gotten divorced and I don't remember hearing about her dating anybody although as a teenage girl, my interest level in my friends mom's life was pretty low. She was a mom to 2 teen girls, working and keeping their house a float was probably all the energy she had. The girls gave her a hard time as teen children can do, so I'm sure she ws spread pretty thin.
My friend was a firecracker, a natural red head with a big attitude. I have a strong suspicion that both my friend and her mother were walking around with undiagnosed mental illness. They both displayed a lot of behaviors that would align with a basic google search of bi polar disorder. She would have extream highs and be so hilarious and upbeat. She would clean the house, organizing the closets and drawers scouring the surfaces and floors. Then she would have big lows where we wouldn't see her at school for over a week. We were all a little gothic and weird so it was all kind of par for the course and went on unnoticed. She met her next major boyfriend in the spring of her 10th grade year. We were all out at a dance club that had an all ages night on Sunday's, they would play a lot of the alternative/industrial/dance music and it was a super fun place to go feel like an adult. Her boyfriend was a little older then us, he was 19 but at the time that felt a lot older. He lived in the city and we all lived in the suburbs. They met on a Sunday night, and I don't think they spent a moment apart for years after that.
Her meeting this new boyfriend blew her world up, She and her mother were feuding all the time to the point of her leaving the house again... to go live with her new 19 year old boyfriend. She ended up dropping out of school and starting to figure out life one day at a time at the age of 16. For the next couple of years I would watch the 2 of them move all over the place. They would live at his parents house, they would rent a room from other friends that were in a house, they would move back in with her mom and turn her mother's basement into a little apartment they would eventually get it together enough to rent their own apartment. They got married in her mother's yard on Valentine's Day (a few day's after her 18th birthday).
Apparently, while all that was going on, the Mother was having an affair with the ex-boyfriend. The teenage, abusive, disgusting jerk that hurt her daughter. She said she it had started when he needed help healing from some sort of broken bone from an accident. She was going over to his house to check on him and they started having feelings for each other and eventually acted on them. Barf. She confessed to us that she had true feelings of love and adoration for him. The affair made her feel young and seen after years of a shitty marriage, horrible divorce and tough realities of dating after a divorce.
As she told us those details, we started thinking about the timelines of her and my friend's tumultuous relationship and finally seeing this puzzle piece put into place. How do you throw your daughter out of the house... how do you not protect your daughter over the neighbor boy? This story has haunted me through the years. Sometimes I wonder did that really happen?! And then the other day I was cutting one of my clients hair and she said "I have to tell you what my mother told me..."
My client told me that when she called to tell her mother that she was making a pretty significant job change her mother said "Well I have some news for you too" and my guest got scared thinking she was going to hear that her mother was having health issues. So while her stomach was in knots... her mother tells her that years ago she had an affair with my clients ex boyfriend. She said he was in his early 20's and her mother was in her late 40's when that went down. My client was gobsmacked, why tell me now she wondered?! I guess she just had to get it off her chest but it actually effected my client and might have irreparable effect on their relationship going forward.
Mother's are women first and deserve to fulfill their needs, but at what cost? The level of damage that can come from this behavior is insurmountable. You have the disrespect of all relationships involved, the broken trust, the secrecy, and the all out selfishness that makes you wonder what is love? Most people wouldn't do this to a friend let alone their own flesh and blood. In both circumstances, the daughters found out long after the relationship with the boy was over. That leaves the question of why did the mother's feel the need to tell this secret after they had gotten away with the affair? In both cases the relationship was a secret while it happened, life went on and could have gone on without anyone being the wiser. The hurt that came from the knowledge that these affair's happened was a huge slap in the face. Look what I did!! Almost as if it were a competition that one person didn't know they were in.
After years of the thankless work of motherhood, the stabs of judge mental verbal assaults a teen girl hurls at her mother without a care in the world. The sacrifices that many woman make so that their child can have a better life then they had, the endless worry and tireless work of providing for her family. These woman had their own "coup de grais" in telling their discretions. They could have kept it to themselves and protected their daughters from the hurt and confusion of these relationships, but something in them had to flaunt their conquest. When the woman that raised you and protected you from all the dangers of the world turns out to be the one that hurts you the most is always such a baffling concept. Unfortunately it happens more often in many less obvious ways.
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