Ask Erin: My Husband Slept With My Mom & It Gets Worse

Buckle up; this week's question is a DOOZY.

Artwork: Tess Emily Rodriguez

CN: rape, incest, and awfulness 

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Q.

Hi Erin,

This is a complete and utter nightmare.

I am dealing with a situation that I am unsure I can even put into words. In fact, I don’t want even to speak these words, but I feel I’m being forced to because it’s being put into my face. I have been married since 2005, and my husband and I have four children. He has a daughter from a previous marriage who just turned 27. We have had issues with our relationship for years. 

He slept with my mother in 2009 when I was pregnant with our son.

I didn’t find out about the affair, or at least I didn’t get confirmation until two or three years after. My intuition and my two-year-old daughter's dream were proven right when I found out from my husband that, yes, he did sleep with my mother. 

I was absolutely destroyed when I realized that the two people I thought loved me the most were the ones who chose to take my life from me. However, I got myself together, went to therapy, and started taking medication to help with the depression and anxiety. The psychologist told me that it would be best to move on because someone that made a decision to hurt me like that would most likely do it again. 

I knew that, but somehow we ended up back together because my husband is a manipulative, narcissistic weirdo, to be honest, and I’m a very forgiving and caring person. So I do blame myself for not thinking straight and being fooled by emotions and lies, and honestly, I hate myself because I feel like I care about people too much. I don’t want to be a vulnerable and weak or dependent person at all. 

My husband has slept with two other women (that I know of) since my mother, including my good friend. 

She never told me what happened. I know this only because my husband told me three years after it happened. 

I have no trust in him, and we have a love/hate relationship. However, we get along pretty good even though we’ve lived in the same house for years without much intimacy at all. I am now in a very bad situation where I’m far away from my family and dependent on him for security, but I will take sleeping on the ground over the things I’ve had to think about in the past two weeks. 

I don’t want to say this because the thought of this is worse than that of him sleeping with my mom, but I suspect he and his 27-year-old daughter have had sexual relations. 

She is a heroin addict and has told me she enjoys seeing people suffer. I am completely opposite and could never hurt anyone, especially those I love. She has also slept with her own mother, so it’s hard for me to say that this is an impossible and sick thing that I’ve come up with in my mind. 

Recently, I’ve woken up to my husband having sex with me. Now I'm having issues and have reason to think I have an std. I haven’t slept with anyone, and I know 100% that it would’ve come from him if I did test positive. I have an appointment coming up, but every minute feels like forever without knowing. I know for sure that my stepdaughter has herpes and probably other sexually transmitted diseases because she sleeps with a lot of different men who aren’t clean and has been doing that for years. 

So most likely—based on my intuition, the hints that my stepdaughter has given me, the energy and reactions that my husband has given me, and the symptoms of an std that I’m experiencing—they have done something, and I just don’t know where even to begin to fix all of this. I am just wondering if there is someone I can talk to so I can get these horrible thoughts out and maybe get some input on the whole situation. I have been keeping records of things that stand out as suspicious, and the conversations I’ve had with my husband have been recorded, also.