u/Away_Ad_312

Throwaway account for obvious reasons. This is going to be long as hell, so apologies in advance.
I’m 53F. I recently separated from my husband of 24 years, H. We have two adult children together, B (daughter) and C (son), and I have an older son, A, from before I met H.
All initials are random and I’m changing or leaving out identifying details.
I’m not posting this so everyone can tell me I’m wonderful and my husband is an asshole. I have fucked up plenty. I enabled people. I stayed in situations I shouldn’t have stayed in. I protected people when I shouldn’t have. I used drugs in my younger years. I made decisions as a mother that I deeply regret.
So please don’t read this as me saying I did everything right.
I didn’t.
I think I need people who aren’t emotionally attached to any of us to tell me what they see.
H and I met online when I was living in America and he was Australian.
This was back when meeting someone online was still considered a little weird. I was at a friend’s house because I didn’t even have my own computer.
It became intense incredibly quickly.
Phone calls, romantic emails, constant communication. Looking back now, what people would probably call love-bombing, although I certainly didn’t know that word then.
I thought I’d found the love of my life.
We were engaged before we’d even spent proper time together in person.
When he finally came to America, we married basically immediately.
A, my little boy, was our best man.
And I made one thing very clear from the beginning: A and I were a package deal.
At first, H seemed completely accepting of that.
The first few months of our marriage were honestly amazing.
Then things went to absolute shit.
There were sexual things very early in our marriage that went completely against who I was and how I’d been raised. Before drugs were even part of the picture, H had me having sex with sex workers while he watched.
I grew up very religious. As a little girl I literally wanted to be a nun.
So going from that person to some of the things happening in my marriage really fucked with my head.
Then drugs came into the picture.
I had basically no serious drug history before H. I’d smoked half a joint as a teenager and drank socially when I was young. That was about it.
H had used drugs recreationally before we met.
I initially started using speed because I wanted to lose weight. It progressed from snorting it to smoking it and eventually into meth.
I’m not blaming H for every drug I put into my own body. I did that. I’m responsible for it.
At one point I was actually the person who introduced H to smoking it rather than snorting it, and he later blamed me for ruining his life because of that.
The whole thing became an absolute disaster.
There was domestic violence.
There were police.
There were arrests.
There was CPS.
There was cheating.
There were other women.
There was manipulation, chaos, drugs and eventually homelessness.
H cheated on me during that period, and there were times I felt like I didn’t even know what was real anymore.
And yes, I stayed.
I protected him.
I lied for him at times.
I tried to keep him out of trouble.
I was angry with him, terrified of him, dependent on him and in love with him all at the same fucking time.
Within roughly seven months of getting married, I attempted suicide because I was so overwhelmed by what my life had become.
My little boy was there through all of this.
That is the part that hurts me the most now.
A was a little kid while two adults were blowing up their lives around him.
There was physical violence between H and me that A was exposed to. There was an incident where H strangled/choked me. There were other incidents. Police became involved more than once.
Eventually CPS became involved too.
At one point A was removed from me and stayed with my mother while I was supposed to stay away from H.
I recently found the old paperwork from that time.
Police reports. CPS paperwork. Court documents. Negative drug tests from when I was trying to get clean. Domestic violence programs I attended. Parenting programs. Records of services for A.
Reading those documents in my 50s instead of remembering everything through the fog of my 20s/30s has been pretty fucking confronting.
The records basically reminded me that this wasn’t something I invented in my head 20 years later.
It happened.
But they also reminded me that I wasn’t some perfect innocent woman either.
I had to do programs.
I had to drug test.
I had to prove I could protect my kid.
I had people forcing me to look at myself.
And I did.
During the worst of it, H and I lost basically everything.
We were homeless at times. We stayed in cars and places we shouldn’t have been staying.
My family relationships were destroyed.
I lost the home/security I believed would eventually be part of my future and basically lost the support system I’d had before H.
There were also things I did during that period that I am still ashamed of.
At one point H went back to Australia for around six months while I stayed in America with A.
I was working in the beauty industry and desperately needed professional equipment I couldn’t afford. I had sex with someone in exchange for a pair of professional scissors so I could work.
Nobody forced me.
H wasn’t even in the country.
I did it.
But when I look back at who I had been before that marriage and where my life had ended up, it still makes me incredibly sad.
Eventually A and I moved to Australia to be with H.
I truly believed America had been the problem.
The drugs had been the problem.
The people around us had been the problem.
H promised me Australia would be different.
And in a lot of ways, it was.
We built a life.
We had B and C together.
We worked.
We laughed.
We had Christmases, birthdays, family jokes, holidays and genuinely happy periods.
I loved H for more than two decades.
I need to say that because I don’t want to do that thing where somebody gets divorced and suddenly claims every day of a 24-year marriage was hell.
It wasn’t.
There was real love there.
There were also things we never dealt with.
Basically we moved countries and put a giant fucking rug over America.
I went through programs and CPS and all of that because I had to.
To my knowledge, H never really did the therapeutic work around what happened.
We just started another life.
Changing countries turned out not to be the same thing as healing.
A carried that history too.
He grew up to have significant mental health issues and disabilities, including autism, PTSD and anxiety.
And I became extremely protective of him.
Too protective sometimes.
I can admit that now.
I rescued him constantly. I made excuses. I stepped in. I tried to fix things.
Sometimes being his mother turned into enabling him.
H increasingly believed I was destroying our family by doing that.
Sometimes he had a point.
A has not always behaved well.
He’s had breakdowns. He’s used way too much weed. He’s spiraled. He’s been aggressive in the past. He has made terrible decisions.
This is not a story about my perfect disabled son being bullied by everybody.
But there’s another important part.
H didn’t originally treat A like some random stepson.
He started the process of adopting him.
I was actually the one who eventually stopped that process because of things that had happened in America and threats H had made about having A taken away from me. I wasn’t comfortable giving him that legal power and then moving A to another country.
But H had absolutely presented himself as A’s father.
Years later, H met A’s biological father, G.
The four of us had dinner together: me, H, A and G.
G acknowledged that he hadn’t been the father A needed and acknowledged H’s role in A’s life. He basically told A that he had two dads.
H accepted that.
After dinner, H and I left A alone with G for several hours because we thought they deserved private time together as father and son.
I’m explaining this because H being a father figure to A wasn’t something I invented later.
Everybody at that table understood it.
But after we moved to Australia, I started noticing more emphasis from H’s family on A being the “stepson.”
Sometimes he was introduced as H’s stepson or as my son rather than H’s son.
There were comments over the years that made A and me feel like there was H’s “real” family and then there was A.
I don’t know whether everybody intended it that way.
But that is how it felt.
And I became even more protective.
There were years of conflict around A.
H believed in much more of a tough-love approach.
I believed A needed more understanding because of his autism and trauma.
Neither approach was perfect.
There were also serious incidents over the years involving A and other family members.
So by the time A was an adult, H was exhausted with him.
Eventually A became unstable/homeless and I brought him back to our property.
He lived in the granny flat behind our house for several years.
For about the last year he was paying $200 a week rent.
He was on disability and had support workers/NDIS support.
Eventually even I agreed he needed to move out.
We gave him 60 days.
His support worker asked for another 30 days so they could arrange somewhere appropriate.
We agreed to 90 days.
I even offered to put another $200 a week into the household myself because H was frustrated about the financial burden.
So A WAS leaving.
There was a plan.
Then one night everything blew the fuck up.
H decided he’d had enough.
He said he’d allowed the bullshit to go on too long, that A needed to get the fuck out and that he was tired of being the nice guy.
There were threats about putting A’s belongings out on the street.
C, our youngest son, sided with H.
And C became extremely aggressive.
C called me a nigger.
Yes.
My own son called his Black/biracial mother the N-word.
He also called me a cunt, threatened me, tried to hit me and told me to get out of my own home.
There have also been serious incidents between C and his sister B.
C has put his hands around B’s neck and strangled her.
He has also stabbed three of her tires.
So when I say I’m afraid of my own son, I’m not saying it because he once yelled at me.
I’m genuinely afraid of C.
And because of the history of violence in my marriage, I’m afraid of H too.
I’m not saying either one of them is going to attack me tomorrow.
I’m saying there is enough history that when my body tells me, “You are not safe here,” I have finally learned to fucking listen.
That night I contacted A’s disability support people.
I got A out.
They eventually got him into a share house.
And I separated from H.
Here’s another part I haven’t been able to get my head around.
While C was doing all of this to B and me, I felt like H was withdrawing affection and closeness from me because of A.
The more I helped A, the further my husband pulled away.
And again, I understand H’s frustration.
If your wife is constantly rescuing an adult child, that affects a marriage.
I get it.
But somewhere along the way it stopped feeling like:
“You need better boundaries with A.”
It started feeling like:
“You can keep being A’s mother, or you can have love and affection from your husband.”
That is what it felt like to me.
And I couldn’t do it anymore.
There’s another irony that I can’t ignore.
H’s parents, D and E, have another adult son, F.
F is in his 50s.
He lives in the granny flat behind D and E’s house.
As far as I know, F doesn’t have a disability.
And for the record, I don’t think there’s anything inherently wrong with that.
He’s their son.
Parents help their adult children all the time.
That’s exactly why the parallel bothers me.
D and E continuing to provide a home for their adult son is apparently just parenting.
But me continuing to help my disabled adult son became one of the central problems in my marriage.
Again: I know I enabled A.
I know he needed to leave.
I had ALREADY agreed he needed to leave.
But “Your adult son needs boundaries and a move-out plan” is very different to me from “Get him the fuck out now or his shit is going on the street.”
And after everything A had already lived through because of H and me when he was a child, I couldn’t do that to him.
I couldn’t save my marriage by abandoning my son.
There is also a whole separate history involving B.
B is an adult now.
A couple of years ago she disclosed that she had been sexually assaulted.
She specifically asked H not to tell his parents.
He told them anyway.
Then, according to B, he denied doing it multiple times.
That destroyed a huge amount of trust between them.
More recently, B felt H wasn’t protecting her during everything happening with C.
Eventually B and I moved out together.
H later basically told B that she had made her choice and that if she didn’t want him as a father, he would step away.
Their relationship has now broken down too.
So this isn’t just “wife leaves husband and takes daughter.”
Our entire family has fucking imploded.
And then, right in the middle of all of this, D—my mother-in-law—was diagnosed with aggressive stomach cancer.
This is where everything becomes even more emotionally fucked.
I love D.
I don’t mean “I used to love my mother-in-law.”
I still love her.
She has been my mother-in-law for 23 years. She’s family to me.
When we found out she had cancer, my instinct was to rally around her.
Even after H and I separated, I held him while he cried about his mom.
I slept beside him as a friend.
I told him I would be there for him.
Not because I wanted my marriage back.
I didn’t.
But I had spent 24 years loving this man, and he was terrified his mother was dying.
I could end my marriage and still have compassion for him.
I could also leave H and still love D.
Eventually, though, I felt H pushed me away.
And meanwhile the situation at home had become so volatile that I genuinely felt endangered.
So B and I left.
The timing is fucking awful.
I know that.
But I didn’t leave because D got cancer.
If anything, her cancer made leaving harder.
I left because I didn’t feel safe anymore.
Now here is where everything stands.
A has completely cut contact with me.
He carries enormous trauma, some of which absolutely came from things he lived through as a child because of decisions H and I made.
It breaks my heart.
But I respect his decision.
I cannot demand forgiveness from my child just because I’m finally able to understand some of what I did wrong.
C and I also have no relationship, but that one is my decision.
I love C.
He is my son.
I will probably love him until the day I die.
But I’m afraid of him.
So I have accepted that I have to love him from a distance.
B and I are rebuilding our lives.
My marriage is over.
I don’t want H back.
There are practical things H and I need to resolve fairly quickly because leaving them unresolved is affecting my ability to access support/funding for B and myself.
I’m trying to give H grace because his mother has cancer.
But my life doesn’t stop because his mother is sick either.
At some point he has to deal with the end of our marriage like an adult so both of us can move forward.
And then there’s the cheating and sexual side of the marriage, which I think I spent years minimizing because compared to everything else it almost seemed normal.
There was infidelity.
There were women.
There were sexual situations early in the marriage that went against everything I believed in.
There were times I participated in things because I wanted to keep H happy or because by then I barely knew who the hell I was anymore.
I’m still trying to work out what was me freely making choices, what was me desperate for approval, what was coercion, and what was just two deeply fucked-up people making fucked-up choices.
I don’t have neat answers.
That’s kind of the point of this post.
I don’t think H is a cartoon villain.
I don’t think I’m some innocent saint.
I don’t think A is an innocent angel.
I don’t think C woke up one morning and became an angry young man for absolutely no reason.
I think this family has about 25 years of untreated trauma, resentment, enabling, violence, secrets, loyalty, love, anger and people protecting the wrong people at the wrong times.
And I think eventually it all fucking exploded.
I also think H and I had a pattern where he would get harder and I would get softer with A.
Then because I got softer, H would get harder.
Then because H got harder, I would protect A even more.
And A was stuck in the middle of that for years.
Meanwhile B and C were growing up watching all of it and forming their own resentments.
Now everybody is hurt.
Everybody thinks somebody else caused it.
And I’m sitting here at 53 thinking, “What the actual fuck happened to my family?”
The thing I struggle with most is this:
I know I enabled A.
I know that damaged my marriage.
I know H had legitimate reasons to be frustrated with me.
But I also believe H used withdrawal, affection and our marriage itself as leverage over my relationship with my son.
I know A needed boundaries.
But I don’t believe throwing a disabled adult’s belongings onto the street when there was already a supported move-out plan was a boundary.
I know C has his own history and anger.
But I don’t believe anything I did justifies my son calling me a racial slur, threatening me or trying to hit me.
I know H’s mother being seriously ill is devastating.
But I don’t believe that means B and I were required to remain somewhere we didn’t feel safe.
And I know I fucked up as a mother when A was little.
Maybe that’s exactly why I couldn’t abandon him as an adult.
I had already chosen an adult man over my little boy too many times.
I wasn’t doing it again.
So Reddit, after this ridiculously long novel:
Am I actually seeing this clearly now, or am I still making excuses for myself?
Was leaving the right thing even with H’s mother seriously ill?
Was I wrong to continue helping A when it was clearly damaging my marriage?
And how do you tell the difference between supporting a disabled adult child and enabling them?
Because at 53, I’m basically rebuilding my entire life, my marriage is over, one son has walked away from me, I’ve walked away from the other for my own safety, my daughter is dealing with her own trauma, and somehow I still find myself wondering whether I should have just tried harder to hold everybody together.
I don’t think I could have.
But after spending most of my adult life trying to fix everybody else, apparently I don’t completely trust myself to know anymore.