My mum and dad were childhood sweethearts. They met, aged 14, on a council estate in Essex. In 1971, aged just 19, they were married. By the time I came along six years later, my dad was at the start of a long and successful powerlifting career.
Growing up, my parents seemed ridiculously happy. Dad owned a building company and Mum looked after the books. It was the 1980s, and the building boom and rapidly gentrifying London suburbs were good to us. Like all self-respecting cockneys done good, we had a holiday home in Spain and a Jaguar XJS on the drive. In my last year of primary school, Dad won his first world title. In 1988, he travelled to South Africa seeking gold and returned home a champion. We celebrated with parties, banners, local awards and newspaper coverage.
But less than two years later, our world fell apart.
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We didn’t know it, but Dad had started taking anabolic steroids. At first, he was given them by a bloke at the gym to help with an injury – everyone was taking them, so he didn’t see any harm in it. Dad was already phenomenally strong; a teenage polymath who excelled at nearly all sports. But steroids change something in you. Building muscle mass and aiding recovery meant he could train longer and harder – and that was all that really mattered. Amphetamines followed – first for competitions, then more regularly. Finally, cocaine. The nail in the coffin of all that was good and lovely in our lives.
At first, Dad’s drug-taking was hidden from us, but the money had to come from somewhere, and he began working as a nightclub bouncer. It was a transition to a weird, nocturnal existence: many of the blokes he trained with did a bit of cash-in-hand door work. They were built for it, after all. The nights on the door added to the days at work and the evenings in the gym. Somewhere along the way, with drugs addling his brain and increasing time spent apart from his family, he began an affair.
Almost two years after winning his world title, Dad walked out on us for the first time, leaving a Dear John letter for my mum and £500 in an envelope. Days later, she discovered that he’d fled to South Africa with his girlfriend and £35,000 of their savings in cash. We were just weeks away from a house move that Dad had said was necessary; a recession was looming, and the business wasn’t doing so well. In reality, he’d torn through their finances, and he could no longer keep up with a normal job, a wife, a mistress and the chaos that addiction was wreaking in his life.
There is no excuse for looking your own, perfectly good and kind husband in the eye and foretelling the day that he will leave not only you, but your newborn child too
Over the next three years, my dad came and left again more times than anyone can actually remember. When I first found out about his affair in 1990, it was Bonfire Night. Two weeks before he left that first time, I stood in a field and threatened him with everything I could think of to make him stay. I told him that he wouldn’t get to come to my graduation, be at my wedding or see his grandchildren. I was 13 years old, and it was all I had: I didn’t understand that even if he said he’d stay, he was making promises he could not keep.
Each time, Mum would take him back, explaining patiently that this was not the man she’d married. It was the drugs, she said. They’d messed with his mind. I didn’t know what to do with that kind of information.
Then, miraculously, one day, he got clean. That makes it sound like a neat, easy story when really, it was anything but. Somewhere in the middle of the mess, maybe because of it, I found faith and, one by one, my family followed, Dad included. His recovery started in earnest and he spent the next six months convincing my mum to give him one last chance. Eventually, after three years of chaos, my parents had their marriage vows blessed in August 1993. It was their 22nd wedding anniversary. They’ve been together ever since.
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It felt like no small miracle that when I pledged my life to another in 2002, he sat next to me in the car, walked me down the aisle and made a beautiful speech that made everyone cry. There was no hint of any baggage from my childhood. We were good. It was all in the past.
But while I had forgiven my dad, it had left a mark I could not yet fully understand. I was neither able to give nor to receive fidelity for the longest time. The first man I was ever faithful to was my husband, but I was not able to trust his faithfulness in return. This is the gift of a broken home, even one that is eventually, miraculously restored – a messed-up perception of what love is.
The feeling that it will inevitably be flawed and vulnerable, not sturdy enough to bear the weight of a lifetime together. “It’s OK,” I told my husband in the early years of our marriage. “If you have an affair, we’ll get through it. As long as we’re honest with one another.” My twisted logic was that if my parents’ marriage was vulnerable, every marriage was.
When we moved to Cornwall and he began commuting to London for a few days each week, my insecurities got worse. When our eldest daughter was born in 2005, the dam was properly and fully breached. You could blame it on the hormones or sleep deprivation, but there really is no excuse for looking your own, perfectly good and kind husband in the eye and foretelling, without a hint of irony or doubt, the day that he will leave not only you, but your newborn child too. He looked at me. “Why would you ever think that I’d want to leave you?” A beat. Then gently: “Emma, I think we might need to talk to someone before this becomes a problem we can’t fix.”
Fifteen years after my dad’s abandonment, I started therapy. For a decade and a half, I had carried these half-buried, subconscious fears without realising the impact they were having on my relationships. And according to research, I’m not alone. The Journal of Family Issues reported that children whose parents were unfaithful were twice as likely to be unfaithful themselves. Ana Nogales, clinical psychologist and author of Parents Who Cheat, found that 70 per cent said the infidelity they experienced as a child affected their ability to trust others. This is the often-unseen consequence of living through a marital breakup – even one that is eventually restored.
“But how did you forgive?” It’s the question that most often comes to my mum, mainly from other women who have also suffered the stunning pain of deceit, but to my brother and me, too. If the intervening years have taught me anything, it’s that there are no easy answers to this question. That we found the grace to look one another in the eye, forgive and choose to move past what had happened was surely miraculous. But also, there was time and counselling and the long consolation of years. It came fast and hard and all at once, and slowly too. The examination of all that needed to be dismantled before something new could be rebuilt. Something that could, this time, bear the weight of a lifetime without buckling under the strain.
For his part, I know that my dad will live forever with the pain of knowing how much he hurt us all, and how hard it was to find healing from that. But I am grateful that we have healed – and that now, I get to create a different future for my own children. One that doesn’t bear the scars of infidelity.
