I am relatively new to your column but I have an issue. I grew up in a conservative Christian household. We had good and bad times but my parents always stood strong together—or so I thought. I have two older siblings, both in college, and I myself have two children full time. I went to my parents the other day with the babies and while I was there I got spit up—of course—and while I was in the bathroom cleaning up I knocked over the magazine stack. I went to pick it up and my mothers journal was in it. I snooped. Apparently my mother hates my father and doesn’t know how to sleep without drinking and wants to kill herself. That in and of itself was troubling enough. But then I went to one of my brothers to try to talk it out and see if I should take what she wrote seriously. Should I be concerned? Was she just venting? And he told me that our dad had confided in him that he wasn’t happy with mom but couldn’t leave! Also: my brother used my dad’s computer one day and when he opened it was on some very intense gay porn! We have no clue what to do. Pretend we never saw anything? Or sit out parents down and say maybe it’s time you guys split so you can be happy?
Concerned And Worried Daughter
My response after the jump…
So your mother leaves her journal lying around—laying around?—where anyone, including the husband she hates, can find it and read it? That’s a cry for help right there.
And while normally I advise a kid to stay out of her parents’ marriage—to say nothing of her mom’s journal and her dad’s laptop—your mother isn’t garden-variety miserable, CAWD, she’s medicating herself with booze and contemplating suicide. So you’re gonna have to speak up. The wages of snooping is not being able to pretend you saw/heard/read nothing.
Maybe it was the discovery that her husband is gay—I’m thinking mom has most likely seen dad’s porn too—that set your mom off. The realization that you’ve been lied to all your adult life by a man who was incapable of loving you is devastating. But even if your mom isn’t aware of your dad’s porn preferences, CAWD, she doubtless senses that something is wrong with her marriage. Like a lot of straight women married to closeted gay and/or bi men, she may think there’s something wrong with her and she could be blaming herself for a disconnect that felt like a fissure at the start of their marriage and feels like the Grand Fucking Canyon now.
Go see your mom, tell her what you read, ask her what you can do to help. If she opens up to you about the porn and/or your father’s sexuality, send her to the Straight Spouse Network. If she tells you that everything’s fine—if she claims she was feeling particularly low when she wrote the journal entry that freaked you out but insists everything is fine now—revert to ignoring the internal dynamics of your parents’ marriage, the contents of your mom’s journal, and the browser history on your dad’s laptop.