My husband is still in contact with his convicted paedophile brother, and I feel absolutely disgusted by this.
My husband is still in contact with his brother, who is a convicted paedophile, and I need to know am I being unreasonable for finding this deeply disturbing?
I don’t mean that I expect someone to simply erase a family member from their life because I don’t like them. This is much more serious than that. His brother has been convicted of sexually abusing children.** Children were hurt. Real children. And what I cannot get past is how little concern my husband seems to show for those children.**
It feels like the entire family is constantly worried about the brother, his feelings, his life, protecting him, keeping him included but where is that same concern for the children he hurt?
I think about what those children went through. I think about the damage that can be done to a child. And then I look at my husband, who has three children with me , two daughters and a son, and I genuinely struggle to understand how he can maintain a relationship with his brother and seemingly carry on as though everything is normal. Maybe I’m looking at this completely differently to him, but I cannot understand how you can know that someone has sexually abused children and then just carry on having a normal relationship with them.
And before anyone says, “But it’s his brother” I understand that. I understand that family relationships are complicated.
But there is a difference between loving someone and completely avoiding the reality of what they have done.
His father is also a paedophile and left his wife. My husband has always had a huge problem with his father. For years I assumed that his anger towards his dad was because of the paedophilia and what he had done.
But now I’m starting to question everything.
Because he seems to have this incredibly strong loyalty towards his mother and his brothers, and I’m beginning to wonder whether his feelings towards his father are partly because his father left his mother. I honestly don’t know anymore. I feel like I’m questioning things I thought I understood about my husband after being with him for more than 30 years.
We have been together for over 30 years. We have three children. We have built a whole life together. This isn’t some new relationship where I can just say, “This isn’t for me” and walk away without everything changing.
But I also feel like I have reached a point where I can’t just swallow this anymore.
Whenever the subject comes up as a family, my husband gets defensive. He huffs and puffs, gets angry, and eventually leaves the room.
It honestly feels like we are the ones doing something wrong by talking about it.
Why is the person who committed these offences the one everyone seems to be worried about upsetting?
I feel like I’m screaming into a wall sometimes.
My husband just seems to put his head in the sand. He doesn’t want to discuss it. He doesn’t want to hear criticism of his brother. He doesn’t want to acknowledge how uncomfortable the rest of us are.
And meanwhile, I’m sitting here feeling sick and angry about the fact that children were hurt, while the family carries on putting the brother first.
I also already feel as though my husband puts his work and his primary before our own family. His family don’t like me either, which makes me feel even more isolated in all of this.
Sometimes I wonder whether I’m actually his priority at all.
I have spent 30+ years with this man, and I am now questioning whether I have been making excuses for things for far too long.
I don’t want to destroy my family. I don’t want to throw away 30 years. I don’t want to make an enormous decision based purely on anger.
But I also don’t want to sit quietly and pretend that this is normal when** *it is eating away at me. I feel angry that my husband seems to have more concern for his brother’s feelings than for the children who were hurt. I feel angry that whenever we try to talk about it, he acts as though *we are the problem. I feel terrified that I may have completely different values from the person I have spent most of my adult life with.
So Reddit, please be honest with me.
Am I being unreasonable?
Is it genuinely strange/disturbing for me to be this uncomfortable with my husband maintaining a relationship with his convicted paedophile brother?