Among str8 spouses, getting healthy is a big interest. Mentally healthy, emotionally healthy, physically healthy. It’s part of healing.

Some of us go on diets, some take up exercise. Some of us who have been exercising all along set new goals for ourselves. Choosing a healthy way to release energy, build strength and endurance, release endorphins has a lot of benefit for us. We find we do have control over some part of our lives – an often ignored part of our lives – ourselves.

Healing and moving forward for ourselves and our families is not an easy task. It can take years to accomplish. But we do it.

For some, getting on the path to healing means getting out of the way of abuse first. All the focus on forgiveness, healing, moving forward does no good if you keep getting rewounded. Being safe – emotionally and physically – is very important for building the strength necessary for healing. That means setting and maintaining healthy boundaries, distancing ourselves from our gay spouses, exes, and soon to be exes, and building our own separate life, centered around our needs and those of our families. Co parenting and custody issues concerning children can sometimes make this necessary distancing impossible, especially where abuse is involved. That’s where the support of family and friends is very important, affirming the good and healthy things you do for yourself and family.

Reclaiming old friendships, making new friends, and planning on time to enjoy social events, company, fun, laughter, and new celebrations are all great ways to help us heal and move forward. For some, a renewed emphasis on spirituality, religion, or a new direction in faith leads to a centered wholeness that heals the spirit. For others, it’s a new job, new residence, new city. Renewal is also part of healing.

Amidst the lingering anger we experience, we often mourn the relationship, marriage, and lifestyle we lost. We thought we were going to grow old with our spouses in a stable marriage – and it was not truly stable, and for some of us not truly a marriage. We develop issues with trusting others and ourselves, nottrusting our senses and expections, even though others may just take some things for granted.Working through anger and depression involves acknowledging how we feel, and giving ourselves permission to feel and express it. For some of us, it takes years to learn how to do this, and let it go. For most of us, the hurt and anger comes back in ways that we least expect it. Building a happy, healthy lifestyle with friends, interests, activities that suit us is absolutely vital for keeping us from self destruction.

For straight ex-wives of gay men, harsh feelings and bad memories come up at the strangest times.

We lose weight, and buy new clothes. We try a new hair color, get a makeover. Then the memory comes back of the last time we bought something new,attractive, sexy – the memory of a husband not noticing, and then telling us it just didn’t make us look special, sexy, attractive. Or the memory of a husband recoiling and demanding to know why we were spending money and behaving foolishly.

For some of us, the weight came right back on. The sleek new clothes went into the closet, along with our own heterosexual female sexual expression.

After separation or divorce from a gay husband, we start to date again. We THINK the new guy is straight. He’s attractive, attentive, romantic – and the experience is very different from what we had in our marriages. And we wonder: am I missing something here? Is this real? Can I trust him – and my feelings? Sometimes we remember what our courtship with our gay husbands was like – we remember the mixed signals, the lack of response to our own sexy touches, kisses, setting the mood with music and lighting, unbuttoning a few buttons, wearing a short or slit skirt – we remember how we didn’t know what that was about then, but we know now. We remember we thought then that he was just being “uptight”, or “reserved” or “naïve” or even that he was respecting us by being “good”. Or we thought it was us – not being good enough. After all, we were in love, attracted to these men. It was outside our experience to think that anything in their behavior was related to being gay.

The memory comes back – and the anger, pain, self doubt. Even if we’re all past that, even if our new relationships are so different.

We think – “I should have known then”. And we ask ourselves the question “Is there something I don’t know now?” Some of us don’t know just how good we are – or were – or could have been. The older we are, the longer our marriages lasted, the more faithful we were, the more difficult it can be to move forward with dating someone new, starting a new relationship. So much of the ongoing supression of our own heterosexuality in our marriages has had an effect on our health, lifestyle, and appearance.

Part of recovering from marriage to a gay husband and reclaiming our own sexuality is to look in the mirror, accentuate the positive, discard the negative, and affirm for ourselves what we know is healthy, attractive, and gorgeous about us in the present. So go ahead. Lose the weight again. Go back to the gym. Buy the new clothes that are just a bit more daring than before. Try the new hair color. Fix your teeth, see your doctor, and if you’re inclined, see your plastic surgeon. It’s not crazy, selfish, frivolous or a waste of money to be a happy, healthy heterosexual female who enjoys being as attractive as she can be.

The profound anger and sense of loss won’t go away – it is a part of us. We can be healthy by acknowledging it, and balancing our new lives with the people, decisions, and things that fill us with happiness, self love, and satisfaction. When we do those things, our lives become filled with pleasant surprises.

There’s no easy way to tell children about separation, divorce, or any change in the family. And regardless of whether a mixed orientation couple decides to stay married or separate, there’s no easy way to tell a child that a parent is homosexual.

Should children be told this, if there is no separation or divorce involved? It depends on the age of the child, and on the individual family.

Young children live very much in the moment, and are more concerned with immediate needs and questions. If there is no separation, and no intent to introduce them to a significant other, there isn’t a need to discuss sexual orientation that they may not understand anyway. When children are old enough to ask questions, those questions should be honestly answered.

When a separation is planned, or a couple is not sure, older children should be told the reasons, including that one parent is homosexual or bisexual. Children tend to want to control the uncontrollable, and may take on responsibility for dysfunction in a family, or blame a parent for not trying hard enough when the whole thing is just not possible. Older children may also have some concerns about being teased or shunned if their peer group finds out. Open discussion within a family helps to give them honest answers and support for these difficulties.

We invite you to tell us what your experiences are in telling your children.

Straight spouses often find that their questions about how to best support our children are often unanswered.  The issues affecting our children are varied, and complex.  They depend upon the developmental level and age of the child, the ongoing relationship with both parents, and the child’s own unique personality and interests.

For most children of all ages, including adult children, the initial question upon disclosure  that one parent is gay is “What happens to our family”?  Younger children want reassurance that they will continue to live in a stable environment, and they’ll want answers concerning how much they will see mom and dad, just like in breakups where both parents are heterosexual.

For adolescents and pre teens, disclosure may come at a time when they are resolving their own questions of personal sexuality.  They may wonder if they will be gay too, or they may reject displays of behavior from their lesbian or homosexual parent that they perceive as “gay”.  This might be due to peer pressure, or simply a rejection of a gay or lesbian expression as a role model.  Or, it may be a complete non issue to them, and they direct their rebellion against the straight parent, wanting to distance themselves from the anger, fear, hurt and rejection that are an ongoing part of this experience.  When the straight parent maintains residential custody and has no time to “move forward” due to the difficulty maintaining a parenting partnership while coping with the same ongoing secrecy, abusiveness, inconsideration, or unrealistic expectations of what is age appropriate that the gay parent displayed during the marriage, the children may rebel or distance themselves from both parents.

Another difficulty our children have is something they share with everyone who has ever been part of a step family – accepting their gay parent’s new spouse or partner, particularly if the relationship is formed quickly after separation or has been a factor in  the decision to end the marriage.  Stepfamily issues are common ones – but when an adolescent is told that their negative feeling toward the gay step parent is due to “homophobia” or “parental alienation syndrome” they can feel as though their own true problems and perceptions are being ignored, with the adult perspective just being forced on them.  Courts usually instruct both parents to not introduce children to new partners “of the opposite sex” until they know it is going to be something serious and ongoing, in order to minimize adjustments the children have to make.  When there is conflict with a gay step parent, it really is not helpful to say “don’t tell your mom/dad because s/he can take you away since I’m gay” or “your mom/dad put this idea into your head because s/he can’t get over it”.

Conflicts will also happen with straight step parents too, especially if the child’s relationship with the gay parent is important to them, and the step parent is uncomfortable with homosexuality.  It’s not helpful to make a parent’s homosexuality a subject to argue about with a step child, when the real issue is the usual “my rules, my house” situation.

Emergence from the closet is often accompanied by a feeling of exhilaration, relief, and a desire to share the new authentic life with family and friends.  To a homosexual person who has been waiting their whole life for this, it doesn’t feel like it’s happening too fast – but to the family in a mixed orientation marriage, it can feel like it happens at lightening speed.  Our children need to adjust to the whole experience, without having too much thrown at them all at once.

There are support groups for children of gay parents, but there appears to be little organized direct support for children of mixed orientation marriages, regardless of which parent they reside with.  Perhaps this is because our family connections are ongoing, complicated, and requiring continuous communications and compromise – not major rallying points for positive images.  Nevertheless, support for our children and their unique issues and perceptions is vital to the ongoing health of our family relationships.

What have your experiences been with mixed orientation stepfamilies?