Infidelity tore my family apart

And I can’t be certain that we can ever forgive

At first, my mum’s friend, Richard, started spending more time at the house.

He’d been a family friend for years. His daughter was close to my brother. Our parents had dinner parties together.

Richard was an anorak, but seemingly harmless. As far as I was concerned, as a child, he was weird but I never saw any chemistry between him and my mother.

As I grew older we saw less of him and his family.

We had an amazing upbringing, my brothers and I. Full of life, games, fighting, exploring. Our parents taught us to be generous, kind, polite humans.

We were close, as far as I remember. And our house was full of life. They had friends to dinner and the laughter would carry up the stairs to our bedrooms.

Eventually, as a young adult I was surprised to hear that Richard was back in touch with my mother.

He would come round occasionally to show my parents a new wine he had made from grapes in his garden. Or cheese he’d bought at a market.

So far so innocent.

He was a keen pilot, and he convinced my mother to learn to fly and helped her get her pilots license.

She was so excited to have a hobby again after years of raising kids and devoting her time to us. She loved to have her own thing to do at the weekend.

She threw herself into flying and seemed to go every weekend.

It was at this time my parents relationship started to take a turn for the worse.

Until that point their relationship had been fun and reasonably adventurous. We’d travelled as a family, we wound each other up but we loved each other and supported each other.

My father would think up cheesy nicknames for my mother. Though these were never reciprocated, now I look back.

They never argued.

And that was part of the problem. They never really talked about the hard stuff.

My mother left home in a quiet village where she felt trapped by her parents. Escape and freedom were hallmarks of her 20s. Her father was very difficult, and she went off to University seeking a loving father figure.

My father left a childhood home of bereavement, and stoic Scottish repression. Sadness drove him away and in my mother he found love, and possibly a sister figure he’d lost when his own sister died years earlier.

This was a sad chapter that he never addressed. Instead he left that box tightly shut and bound it up with other sad events that he could never face or discuss.

The love they gave me and my three brothers was real. We achieved in life because they gave us everything they could.

Sure. They were both a bit damaged, but isn’t everyone?

In terms of emotional intelligence they both lacked the tools to navigate what was just around the corner.

So when my mother started to feel like a spark had gone in their marriage, she couldn’t articulate it properly. Dad couldn’t dare ask, for fear of discussing it.

She invited me to help build her a little tin shack for the plane she had bought with the man she flew with.

I was naive. I was pleased to help my mother with her newfound passion and set to work, with a couple of local builders to put this steel aircraft hanger together.

My father even pitched in towards the end, maybe to try to take an interest. More likely to see what sort of a relationship was brewing between his wife and the man she was flying with.

Dad was suspect but instead of addressing the situation he played games. He would offer Richard some Whiskey, knowing that it turned him nasty.

My mother would then berate my father for giving him a drink, as “you know he has a drinking problem.” She would get furious with him, like I’d never seen before.

That’s when it started to appear as though the man was dominating my mum. He had a temper. He seemed to be organising her and telling her what to do.

Weekends flying planes turned to nights away.

My dad said to me one day “I must have mug written across my forehead.”

I think we all did, dad.

I would occasionally come home and see her being driven off by Richard. They drove right past me staring straight ahead. Guilty faces on them.

At that point it was clear what was going on.

My attempts to tell mum to slow down and talk to Dad were met with exasperated waves of the hands, as if I was too stupid to realise how difficult my father was.

My attempts to tell Dad to stand up and tell mum how much she was hurting him fell on deaf ears.

They just could not reconcile what was going on.

It was already too late.

She was having a full blown affair.

Then things moved fast.

My parents announced they would be separating. To be friends. This would be much better for them both, they said.

And my mother would pursue a relationship with the man. He was also leaving his wife with whom he had two children. One was best friends with my brother.

My parents sold our family home in a rush. Mum moved in to a new house with him.

I moved first into a house owned by a friend of my father, and then into a rental property while I considered what I would do.

Dad was a mess. Drinking more than usual and taking no care of himself.

The loud, ebullient and positive man I had looked up to was absolutely floored by the rapid and irreversible descent our family had taken into infidelity, divorce, break up.

My mum begged me and my brothers to try to get on with the man she left my father for. When we refused, she pushed us all away. She pushed her own parents and her sister away.

We were numb to her. Numb to her desire for us to accept this new situation.

Eventually they split up. The man was taken back by his wife. My mum never tried to go back to my father. I don’t think he would ever have been able to navigate past the pain she caused him.

My mum was destroyed. She had lost her home, her husband, her new relationship had broken down. We couldn’t get close to her for years after.

Dad moved on. He went to counselling. After a bit of online dating he found a partner. She was the polar opposite to my mum in every possible way.

My mum, despite her transgression, is a tall, beautiful, smart woman. She’s endlessly giving. She is involved in local church groups, she cooks for people, she gives and she runs herself half to death driving across the country to visit me and my brothers and our own families.

My Dad is old now and suffers health problems. On top of his mental box of unresolved issues he uses humour to deflect any questions about his own feelings. He has fallen out with my brother. His relationship with his new wife is difficult because, unlike my mother who became sick of his flaws, his wife revels in them. She loves the fact that he doesn’t like to talk about his feelings, that he is endlessly generous with her without needing her to engage with him on difficult matters. He does as he is told.

And so here we are.

I see a counsellor too because, as an eldest son whose family has fallen apart, I have felt responsible for years for the break up. That I could do nothing about it.

I wasn’t able to help my bothers navigate it either because I didn’t Have the tools.

So now every member of our family has found new families. We each live in a different city, even a different country.

We don’t talk about the past because it hurts everyone. We don’t talk about the future because we all know what was lost when my parents’ relationship fell apart prematurely.

We just love our own partners and try our best not to make the same mistakes as our parents.

Trouble is, we are our parents. They are our blueprint.

For my childrens’ sake, instead of putting my parents on pedestals, I feel I have nothing else but resentment, regret and sadness bound up in the unconditional love I have for the people who raised me.