why won't my parents grow up?

[Ersatzteile]

I live in NY and as you know our governor just resigned because he was seeing a prostitute, he has a wife and three teenage daughters.

 

20 yrs ago my dad had an affair and left my mom (and sister and me - altho he did not pursue a relationship with the other woman, it was just a cheap fling), our family broke up and I have been dealing with their drama ever since. Nobody in either my dads or mom's families reached out to me and my sister, we were left to cope by ourselves as best we could and honestly at that time (I was 20) I didn't have too many friends and was barely handling college. So I have never really been able to tell anyone on earth how painful it all was for me. Plus on top of it my mother glommed onto me for all her emotional support and basically just spewed her emotions all over for me a very long time. I was not allowed to have any of my own.

 

so this whole thing in the news has been bothering me. Anyhow I am really good at stuffing down any semblance of human emotion with either of my parents so, I was just talking about the political side of it with my dad via e-mail and I mentioned I felt sorry for the 3 teenage girls having to put up with what their father did, and what does my father do but send this very weird and totally sexist e-mail back at me about how HORRIBLY UNFAIR everyone was being to poor Governor and how if it weren't for men sowing their wild oats there wouldn't be any life on this planet and a whole bunch of other just weird, totally immature bull****.

 

Well, I really wanted to let him have it but I figured I had to word it veeeeery carefully or else I could very likely never hear from him again, so I finally just politely explained to him it's very hard for young women to find out their father has been cheating, that I knew from personal experience and that I was glad I was not 14 at the time. signed it "Love, [my name]" - it really was not a snotty letter.

 

You would THINK, that 20 years later, he would have GROWN UP enough to CARE what I went through, but apparently not! I didn't hear from him for days and then when I did it was just very terse and like he didn't want to hear from me again for a while.

 

Then this morning, oh wow, so the new governor and his wife were unfathful to each other! Now I had to put up with my mother on this! She was going on and on and on about how horrible men were and all that stuff and I just politely pointed out that nobody should ever be self-righteous about other people's marriages especially if they had one that didn't work out, because as wrong as affairs are, they are probably the end result of a marriage where something is wrong. And she gets all upset and says "You take that back!" (you know, me implying that she wasn't 100% innocent in everything she ever said or did)

 

So what is HER problem??? 20 years later and she is still playing the helpless victim!!!

 

WHY WON'T MY PARENTS GROW UP? It's been 20 years!!! 20 YEARS!!!!

it's like they are frozen in time, there has been no moving on, no acknowledgment of what they have done to their kids!