"My daughter lied about my wife's affair."
I (43M) was married to my wife, Lara (31F) for 6 years. I also had a kid from my previous marriage, Sarah(8F). It was really hard for me to date and get to know women after me and my daughter's mother divorced due to infidelity issues, regarding the fact I had a kid and trust issues, so meeting Lara was really a blessing.
We met at a Aquarium where I was with my daughter and she with her neice. That day I kept noticing her and how she was treating the kid and it brought a smile to my face.
The next time I met her was an year later, at the said niece's birthday. It turned out that Sarah and the niece was at the same class and seeing her again was a pleasant suprise.lt was like fate.I mustered up my courage to speak to her and finally talked to her.
She was a great company and she spoke really well and it made me like her more. Since it's been 3 years to my divorce I shot my shot with her and decided to take her out for a coffee. And next thing I know we we've been married for six years.
Lara has been an amazing wife and a mother. She treated Sarah well and since her mother was not in the picture, she quit her job and took the responsibility to take care of her full-time.
She even decided to wait to have kids until Sarah was a little older hence she didn't want her to feel left out and was scared that Sarah wouldn't get enough attention. She thought Sarah multiple languages and shared her culture with her. Her relatives is amazing with her and treat Sarah no less then a bio daughter of Lara.
She even have shared her recepies and baked goods with my family and everyone looks forward to holidays whenever Lara host them. She and my mom has developed a great relationship. My friends and family tells me that I won lottery with her and it really feels like it.
Even when Sarah's bio mom showed up after abandoning her own daughter for 9 years, she was the one who encouraged me to let Sarah connect with her and let her be in my daughter's life. She tried her best to help Sarah get to know her mother and even built a friendship with Anna(Sarah's mother).
However, earlier last year, around May I noticed that my daughter was distancing herself with Lara. This was weird as my daughter never had any fallout with the relationship with Lara as most teenagers do with their mom. Even Lara noticed and cried about it multiple times. So one night I decided to talk to my daughter and ask her what was going on.
Sarah told me that she found out Lara was having an affair with someone and she's hurt that Lara betrayed her and me. Hearing that felt like someone was crushing my heart and the hurt on my daughter's face intensified it. I went straight to my room and woke Lara up, and yelled some hurtful things at her.
I'm not proud of how I handled the situation and I agree I could have done better. However, the only thing I can think about was how hurt my daughter was. I kicked her out that night, and that was the last conversation we had without a lawyer present.
Around November our divorce was finalised and I moved on with my life. I did do some things I regret to Lara so I didn't want to make it hard for her, and just wanted to be done with her so there was no revenge and petty actions involved. I did let my family know the real reason and they were disappointed to say the least.
My daughter also doesn't have a relationship with Lara and we cut contact with her family and threatened legal action if they tried to meet with us. I didn't want anything to do with her.
During August I decided to suprise my daughter with a trip to celebrate her 16th birthday. Since I was dealing with the divorce last year, I wasn't able to really celebrate with her. So I decided to pack her bag and take her straight to airport from her sleepover with friends.
I asked my younger sister to help me with packing Sarah's clothes. While she was packing I saw a notebook on her nightstand with a polaroid of her and Lara peaking. Curiosity got the best of me and I opened it to find out it was her dairy.
This might have been wrong of me to go through my daughter's dairy, but I went through it. And I have not been well ever since. She wrote about how she lied about Lara having an affair and how she even made "evidence" to make me believe her if I questioned her.
She wanted me and her mother to be together be a family and kick Lara out of the picture. However after Lara left us is no longer in her life, she's regretting it. It felt like my heart broke for the second time.
I started crying and I haven't even cried when Lara add I divorced. My sister noticed me and I asked her to leave and keep it a secret from everyone. She asked what happened and I showed her the dairy. She was shocked but told me that she respects my decision and vowed to keep her mouth shut.
I drank the night away and just have been in automotive mode like a robot. From work to home and drank till I black out and returned to work with a raging hangover. My daughter has noticed it but I told her it was just a stressful time at the work.
But last Sunday she blew up at me saying that she noticed that I've been different since Lara left us and tolf me if I wanted to stay with a cheating wh0re, I was more that welcome to abandon her. That did hurt like hell, but I just left to my room and laid on the bed and cried the night away.
It have been around two weeks since I found out about it but I haven't said anything to my daughter. I want to bring my emotions under control before saying anything I'd regret, and I don't want to repeat the mistake of taking actions while I'm hurting.
And quite frankly now that I'm thinking with a sober mind, I'm not really sure how to confront my daughter. I need the closure and I don't think I can just act like nothing happened. I am quite ashamed to say so, but I want my Lara back. So Reddit, thank you for taking your time to read and I hope you can help me with this and please be kind.
Let's see what readers had to say about this:
ghayuwt writes:
I’m speechless. It sounds like Lara is an amazing woman and if I were her I wouldn’t want to hear from you after your reaction and not hearing her out or believing her? I think she is owed an apology and explanation now that you know your daughter lied. I just wouldn’t expect anything from her in return.
As for your daughter - at 15/16 this behavior is incredibly immature and malicious. Lara raised her and she threw away that mother/daughter relationship for someone who abandoned her and randomly showed back up in her life? Your daughter needs therapy. As a parent, you should force her to go.
Don’t give her a choice in the matter. Make it clear you are disappointed and will not be getting back together with her bio mother. I’m not sure what role her bio mom played in this, but I think to cut contact with her would only push your daughter away so I wouldn’t recommend that.
I think you need to begin the conversation by letting her know you need to talk. Calmly let her know you came across her diary - don’t let her make you feel guilty for reading it. You are her father and she lives under your roof.
You are entitled to read a diary and go through any of her electronics (phone, computer, tablet). Explain to her the consequences of her actions (therapy, grounding, you going through her phone to see if her mother or friends played a role in this - whatever makes sense to you).
Tell her you love her but won’t tolerate this behavior from her. In two short years she’ll be a legal adult, try to end this behavior now so she doesn’t go off into the world thinking she can lie and manipulate to get her way in any situation.
crant writes:
You have burned your bridges with Lara OP. You arbitrarily kicked her out of the house and divorced her with only the "evidence" given to you by your daughter, who frankly sounds horrendous.
I very much doubt that she cooked that up by herself and it seems rather a coincidence that all this occured after your first wife popped back into your lives. You seem afraid of your daughter.
I don't understand why you haven't confronted her. Are you afraid of her reaction and is there something about her behaviour in general that you are not disclosing? That level of deviousness suggests she need at least counselling, if not psychiatric assessment.
I frankly think you are grasping at straws to entertain any thought of having Lara back. I know what my response to you would be if I were her. Leave Lara alone. Hopefully she is making a good life for herself and will meet a man who knows her worth and can make her happy.
She doesn't deserve to be sucked back into your daughter's drama or to be with a person who was able to dispose of her so readily. You should consider counselling for yourself, aside from the intervention your daughter needs. It will help you understand your responses and how you manage your daughter by avoidance.
dystoppir writes:
I'm sorry about you and Lara, bec your daughter and you believing her heinous lies utterly destroyed your marriage beyond repair.
At this point the only thing left is therapy and tell Lara that you found out your kid was lying, and you're deeply sorry for your words and actions and for believing your daughter and not investigating her accusations further. Don't ask her for reconciliation or a second chance, it's over forever.
About your daughter, she definitely has strong psychopathic tendencies, and her journal writing shows it, and her actions were beyond a normal AH teen behavior. IMHO I think that in the case of nature vs nurture, nature won.
Your daughter has no regrets and no remorse for hurting Lara, who gave her motherly love, and treated her with love and kindness and your daughter in return decided to lie about her, making false accusations and destroying your marriage.
She's a teen, and everyone makes mistakes, but her actions are not mistakes, as she made a planned calculation to get Lara out of your life, and she held her lies during the storm and you find out bec you read her journal. Get therapy ASAP and good luck
cr3atpy writes:
You need to man up and talk to your daughter. You need to tell her you saw her diary. Frankly You are the adult, lying on the bed crying won't help. But talking to a therapist will.
Frankly you don't have to say things perfectly. It may be time for boarding school to get distance and perspective. I would find another place for daughter to stay. your sister for example. You will not be able to think clearly, until you have some space. I would distance her and her mother. Clearly your child is her mother's daughter. Leave Sarah alone.
The next day OP came back with this update.
First of all thank you all for the advice. I did check the comments frequently yesterday, but was not able to reply as I was overwhelmed.
A lot of you have been asking how the confrontation with Lara went. It wasn't as excessive as a lot of you were assuming. I woke her up and asked her why she cheated on me. She asked me what I was talking about. I just said that I don't want her in my house anymore and she needs to leave because I can no longer bear to look at her face.
That she was the least person I would expect to betray me. She looked at me shocked and just started crying and she didn't say anything else. She called her cousin to come get her and she just left and before she did she said that she swears that she never cheated on me and she would have never even thought to.
That was the last time we saw each other, I blocked her and never contacted her directly and she didn't. Now that I think about it, I think the way I treated her hurt her too much. She grew up in a "conservative family" so she never dated nor had any relationships as she was expected to get arranged marriage. So I really was the first one after her first arranged marriage broke up. It's not my place to say why it ended but it wasn't her fault.
And about the evidence, she just had some screenshots of chats that I never saw. I believed Sarah without a doubt because she was my daughter.
I'm not telling this to defend myself or anything but to give a perspective on why I acted the way I did. When I was with Anna, my younger sister actually told me that she knew Anna was cheating on me as she saw her and the AP during a night out. When I confronted Anna she gaslighted me and I wrote an apology letter to her and the AP who was a manager at my workplace because that was the only way she would forgive me.
However, she left me and Sarah when we were spending holidays with my parents, stole some valuables from my parents house and our apartment and drained our savings account in which I had my inheritance and college fund to buy us a new house. She basically left me and Sarah broke and heartbroken.
I always had my regrets about not believing my sister because she didn't have any "evidence" so it seems that my poor judgement cost me my wife.
I forgot to mention in the last post but after the fight me and Sarah had she's currently with her mother. As for the diary, she brought it over to her mother's house but my sister had taken some pictures at the time as I was not in a great headspace. And for the writing, I'm sure it's her handwriting as she and Lara have quite the same handwriting.
I also saw the question about whether my daughter went to therapy when Anna came back. She didn't as Anna didn't want to send her to a shrink and now that I think about it it was stupid of me but I just wanted to give Anna a chance to be a mother I guess. Lara didn't push for it as Anna threw quite the tantrum but brought Sarah a diary so that she can write what she can't say to others.
Also, my daughter has never done anything like this before and the biggest lie she has ever said was about not cheating on an exam but later cried and confessed to it. I really don't have any idea why Sarah would do it and I'm not sure if Anna had a hand in it.
I don't have a solid plan but I think I'll start by sending Sarah to therapy after confronting about the affair. I haven't yet decided what to do with Lara. It hurts to even think about her and I keep remembering about how I vowed to be there for her but I never was able to.
ALSO I NEVER A^%$%D LARA BUT CONSIDERING WHAT SHE HAD DONE FOR ME AND SARAH, I DON'T THINK IT WAS FAIR TO HER FOR ME TO RAISE MY VOICE AT HER.
Here's what people had to say after the update:
you have handled this whole situation horribly. Sarah needs serious therapy if she can lie so bad on someone who has her supported unconditional. She also needs to apologise to Sarah and her family it’s the least she can do. Also why you would not ask Lara any questions or let her talk to hear her side and basically believe your daughter without evidence leaves me at a loss for words.
Lastly all I hear is a lot of self pity from you and worrying how to confront your daughter. Maybe if you give Lara the same courtesy you give Sarah you might of learned the truth sooner. Truly awful
You are a WEAK COWARD who doesn’t want the public to know you were played by your messed up daughter. Your apology should be as loud and public as your accusations were! You are using your daughter as an excuse to not do so. You are a pathetic human being. Where’s the post where you called your ex and apologized, admitted you and your daughter are the scum who should be shunned NOT HER? Crickets.