Hours After My Wedding I Discovered My Father’s Secret — and the Forged Document That Would Finally Free My Mother After 34 Years
That is what protection actually looks like.
Not deciding what a person can handle and hiding the rest.
Making sure that when they handle it, as they have every right to, they are not handling it alone and with nothing.
It is the difference between treating someone as a child and treating them as an adult, and I had been on the wrong side of it, and it had taken my wife threatening to leave me to turn me around.
I keep returning to that word, protect, because it is the word every man in my family used to justify every harm we did, and because it is such a good word, such a warm and unimpeachable word, that it can hide almost anything.
My father protected my mother from the truth of his affair.
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