Praying for you walk,,,,
What a mess. The good of all is I'm sure your daughter will see the good and strong female role in her life..
Shes going to need it! Things are only going to get worse for her in this crazy messed up world. She'll appreciate you end the end as the real deal. I wish you the best

Last edited by Scrupulous (April 5, 2018 12:06 am)

walkbymyself wrote:

..........I wrote a post,.....

Omg Walk.....I can feel the strength in your words. 

My thoughts are with you

walkbymyself wrote:

There's this endless succession of what-ifs that parade through my brain each night starting around 1 a.m. and continuing until I see it's light out.  Last night's thought that wouldn't go away:  does my daughter already know?  Knowing her ... she might well have confronted him.  He might have sworn her to secrecy, to protect me.  What if he's manipulated her into living a lie, lying to her own mother?  Here all this time I've been trying to protect her, what if she's also been trying to protect me?

One way I re-write this script is to pre-emptively block him from creating another cover story on top of his existing cover stories.  Sometimes the way to do this is to say "What have you and J. discussed about this?" instead of "Have you and J. discussed this?"  The first question is phrased in a way that makes it a little harder to react with an instinctive lie.

I think you should ask this question of your daughter not your husband and if she knows nothing....then you should be the one to tell her, not turn it into an argument with your husband.
 

Wondering: there are two separate things that make me think my daughter may have figured it out.  But, they can be read either way, maybe she hasn't.

She's 22 now, but back when she was about 12 or 13, she came to me and told me she found "pictures of penises on Daddy's desktop."  I brushed it off as Daddy trying to be funny, but of course that's not an explanation that will really satisfy her, in this day and age.

Second, from time to time she's playfully teased my husband saying "Daddy, what would you do if you found out you were gay?"  This most recent time, when she was home over Christmas break, was a day or two after they'd had a really huge fight.  I was still smoldering furious with him.  She started lightheartedly teasing him like that, and in retrospect we could read this one of two ways: she's just trying to have a little fun after this huge fight ... or maybe she's sending him a message, that he needs to clean up his act or she's going to out him.  It could be either one.

I don't have anything definitive, but on the other hand the thing with the porn on his computer is not something she'd have forgotten.  And, she's exactly the kind of person who very well could have confronted him somewhere along the line.

Honestly, though, there comes a point when you have to step back and look at what you have and what's happening.

I am not trying to prove to a jury in a court of law that my husband has cheated on me.  If I wanted to, I could, but I don't need to prove anything at all to anybody at all.  So if he wants to deny everything, he's only wasting the oxygen in the room.

I don't need to prove to a mathematical certainty that there was stuff in my husband's car.  I don't care whether he takes it out and hides it and claims it was never in there.  As I said, this is not court.  And, my daughter is not going to call me a liar.

There isn't some hypothetical jury out there I need to convince.  I AM the jury.  I've seen enough to convince me.  Arguing over whether there's some crazy alternative explanation for everything that's gone on for the past quarter century is a waste of my time.

The issue of how and when to approach my daughter gets a little circular.  Sure, if I confront my husband he might call our daughter and bully her not to disclose anything to me ... for what purpose?  To keep me from finding out what I've already found out?  He might try to pull some nonsense with our assets, which would also be short-sighted because there's enough on our financial records right now that I'd have no trouble tracing any mysterious transactions.  At best, he'd have to pay back anything he stole.  At worst, he could get disbarred.

There's a big downside to my approaching our daughter behind my husband's back: I would be doing exactly what I'm worried he has done.  I would be manipulating her, telling her something awful about her father and then swearing her to secrecy.

If my daughter has actually confronted him, there's only one argument that he could possibly make to her to get her to maintain her silence with me.  The only argument he'd have would be that her mother would be devastated to find out this secret.  That's the only thing he could use, to keep his secret safe.  So if I end up sitting down and telling her everything I've discovered, what's her motive for keeping his secret?  At worst, she'd be ashamed of herself for not being forthright with me -- and I'm in no position to accuse her, since I did the same thing to her.