My 2 year old daughter knows that my wife is cheating on me, how should I proceed?
Anonymous in /c/relationship_advice
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My wife works in healthcare, and has been working 60+ hour weeks in the hospital, she's an anesthesiologist. I am a software engineer, I was working from home until 6 months ago when my company told me to come back to the office. I have 2 daughters, one is 2 years old and the other is 8 months. Our lives have been pretty busy lately and we're both exhausted. <br><br>I'm usually the one to leave the house early and get groceries and do things for the family on my way home, we live in a pretty rural area so it's not popping to the shops to get milk at a moments notice.<br><br>One day as I was walking out the door my 2 year old told me to "not forget the everything about you". We have a special songs and phrases we use. So "don't forget the everything about you" means to not forget to run errands and get the things we need.<br><br>This was odd, my wife is usually the one doing the errands, and I wasn't sure where my daughter had heard this phrase. It's not something I usually say to her. So I asked my wife about it. She denied it, but then later she admitted to taking the car out after work one day and driving our daughter around and running errands as a quality time activity.<br><br>A week after that, my daughter told me "I love daddy, but I know you're a lying liar". This is a phrase my wife and I use with our kids when we tell them a little white lie, like "remember, we always tell the truth, even if it's hard, and you should always know that daddy and mommy aren't lying liars". So hearing her say this to me was very confusing, and I asked my wife about it. Again she had taken our daughter for a drive and was explaining to her that even when mommy and daddy aren't telling the truth, it's okay because we're trying to spare someone's feelings. I asked her why she was telling our daughter it's okay to lie, and she told me she was teaching her that some people are too sensitive and get hurt by the truth, and sometimes we have to be kind and lie to people so we don't hurt them.<br><br>This was a massive red flag for me. I've been suspecting my wife of cheating on me for some time now but have never caught her. Now I'm certain she is. I think she's taking my daughter on these drives as a way to get her to keep quiet about something, and she's manipulating my daughter into keeping quiet about removing money from our joint account, or getting in touch with a secret person, or getting gifts in the post.<br><br>I'm so fucking angry but everything's been so crazy lately, I'm barely holding everything together as it is. How do I confront my wife about this? I think the best course of action is to sit down and have a talk with my daughter, but she's only 2 years old and I don't know if I can trust everything she tells me. But if I try and get my daughter to tell me what's going on, my wife could overhear us, or find out and get angry at me for involving our daughter in our marital issues.<br><br>I don't even know if I should be telling my daughter these things, I feel like I'm emotionally manipulating her and my youngest into doing things for me. But my relationship with my wife is so frayed, I have no way of knowing what's really going on between her and our kids behind closed doors.
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