My Husband Doesn’t Know About My Secret Bank Account. It Has a Dark Origin.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

When my husband and I were first married, I was sexually assaulted at a party and, as a result, became pregnant. I decided to keep the pregnancy, and while it was probably not the decision my husband would have made, he said he would stand by me and that any child I had would be our child.

At the time I was in a very low place. I didn’t ever share this with him, but I didn’t believe him. I was obsessed with the idea that he was going to leave us, that we would be left with nothing. I eventually confided this to my brother, and he helped me set up an emergency savings fund in my name only, as a failsafe if things did go poorly. My brother started it off with a pretty sizable amount of money and I added to it whenever I could, squirreling money away for about three years, until I got in a better head space and could see that my husband is very much a devoted father to our daughter, and that even if we were to end up divorced he would still be there for her. My issue now is that I have this pool of money my husband is unaware of. I’ve offered it back to my brother, but he’s said to just put it toward our kid’s education “or something.”  I don’t know how to tell my husband that we have this money without sharing the whole story about how little faith I had in him. Especially considering that money that could have been spent on dinners out or vacations was going into this fund behind his back. I just feel sick over the whole thing. I don’t want to make him feel bad, but he would certainly notice if our kid’s college fund suddenly increased by this much.

—Secret Keeper

Dear Secret,

I think you need to come clean, for the sake of your marriage (and its long-term health) and for your own sake, because holding on to a big secret is hazardous to your health. For at least the last decade, neuroscientists have been aware that the stress of keeping big secrets causes cortisol and other stress hormones to surge, which affects your blood pressure, GI tract, metabolism, memory, and more. More recent research has zeroed in on why secret-keeping is so stressful: It isn’t so much the not-telling that harms you; it’s the thinking and worrying about what the result of disclosing your secret will be.

So while I emphatically do not think that the secret you’re keeping is a “bad one” (indeed, it seems to me that it’s a perfectly understandable one), I think you need to get it off your chest. The sooner, the better. And context is everything. Don’t lead with, “So, I’ve got this secret bank account.” Take your husband back with you to those early dark days. You didn’t tell him then how harrowing they were; that doesn’t mean that you can’t tell him now. Because that’s the real secret—not the money. This won’t be an easy conversation, but a strong and loving marriage—which it certainly sounds like you have—will be able to withstand it.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

My mom remarried 24 years ago after surviving a marriage to my father that was marked by domestic abuse. She lives in a beach home that is co-owned by my stepfather and me. I financially support them both. This past January, my otherwise healthy mother came down with a severe bout of colitis. She was hospitalized at a small hospital near her home. My sister and I live a distance away and expressed concerns about the quality of care at this hospital—concerns my stepdad didn’t share. We accepted this (uneasily). As things progressed, however, it became clear to my sister and me that our mom needed more and better care than could be provided at the small beachside hospital. We tried hard to get my stepdad to move her to a major university hospital. That did not happen. She continued to fail, and eventually had to have surgery to remove her colon. Fast-forward to March, when she was hospitalized again, and again failing. This time, over the objections of my stepdad, I had her moved to a major medical center, where she was found to have an infection and continued disease that had not been diagnosed. She was discharged yesterday and is now much better, but her disease will require management in a university setting. My sister and I want to move our parents to an independent care community near me so I can assist with appointments, as I live near a university medical center that has doctors who specialize in my mom’s disease. Living near me will also allow me to help care for my mom and be available to help my stepfather. He is dead set against this. He says we are manipulating our mom into accepting this move.

Our mom suffered a great deal during this medical scare and it’s clear the whole thing could have gone differently. I know this has been traumatic for the whole family, so I’m trying to be sensitive to my stepdad’s viewpoint, without pulling the trump card of “I pay for everything.”  But it seems like he’s putting his preference to live at the beach over our mom’s health. How can we handle this situation without dividing our family?

—Faithful Daughter

Dear Faithful,

I’m so sorry your mother has gone through this. I feel for all of you, I do. And without knowing more about the dynamic between you and your stepfather over the last quarter-century and why you are supporting them, it’s hard for me to fully assess what’s going on here. But I will say this: I think it’s unfair to jump to the conclusion that your stepfather is prioritizing his desire to live on the beach over his wife’s health. There are other reasons that someone his age would be reluctant to move to an independent care facility; there are other reasons someone his age would dread leaving a familiar, comfortable place (where presumably he and your mother have friends and other ties to the community) for a new, unfamiliar one; there are even reasons he might not be thrilled about living so close to you, given how much power you already have over their lives.

I am not suggesting that this means your idea is terrible. It might be the right one. But I must tell you that this is not your decision to make. It’s your mother’s. She gets to decide whether access to reliable, expert medical care and the ongoing help of her daughter are her top priorities. They may not be, and as hard as that would be for you to hear, if that’s the case, you don’t get to overrule her.  That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be very clear to your mom about what you fear and how strongly you feel about the importance of this move. But tell her. Don’t talk about all this with your stepfather as if your mother were incapable of deciding for herself.

Now, if you believe that your stepfather is a bully, if your sense of their marriage is that he is too controlling and that your mother has no free will, that’s a horse of a different color. But you don’t say that. What you do seem to be saying is that the battle for control of the rest of your mother’s life is one that’s being waged between her husband and her adult child. And I’m sorry, but that’s not fair to her. When people age, they don’t lose their agency.

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Dear Care and Feeding,

We moved to a new town a few years ago and enrolled our kids in a local private school (the public schools, once well-regarded, stayed closed for a long time due to COVID and have not really recovered). Almost everything about this private school is great (the other kids are kind, the teachers are caring, athletics and arts programs are strong), except for core academics, which are unambitious. Our boys (9 and 11) have some specific strong academic interests and have asked us for more to do in those areas (math for both, computer science for one, a foreign language for the other), so we set them up with classes outside of school. They find most of the school’s academics pretty unchallenging, but tolerable in light of all the other positives of the place. In their areas of their specific interests, though, the kids are way ahead and bored to tears.

And while up to now they have had enough free time to do both all their schoolwork and their outside classes, a growing homework load (much of which seems like busywork) and more intense hobbies/extracurriculars mean that time is becoming an ever scarcer resource. My spouse has suggested we talk to the school and ask that our kids be excused from math class and allowed to use the class time to go to the library and do their outside math work. (Our older kid can already manage what this school will cover in 9^th grade, to give you a sense of the disparity between “outside” and school math.) But I’m a little apprehensive about how such a request will be received. My spouse counters that he went to a public school and his parents asked for enrichment, and that the school was happy to step up: He got to take his first high school class when he was in 5^th grade, was given distance-learning opportunities for classes not offered locally, and skipped a grade. Surely, he says, a private school should be willing to let kids spend one class in the library working independently. How do you think we should proceed?

—Study Hall Supplicant

Dear Supplicant,

You should ask. But you also shouldn’t get your hopes up.

Your husband’s experience as a child is heartwarming, but that doesn’t mean this school will proceed as his school did. As to his point about how a private school “surely” should be amenable to a smaller ask: I have my own anecdote about this, and it’s not pretty. For several years, my daughter went to a small private school that was also (to put it kindly) academically unambitious. (The reasons I enrolled her there, then kept her there for longer than I wished to despite its many shortcomings, are too complex to go into here.) I tried a variety of ways to deal with the mismatch between her schoolwork and her abilities—none of which required any extra work from her teachers or were any more onerous than what you plan to ask for—and the school refused every time. In the end, I took her out of the school and homeschooled her until she started high school (we have one very good public high school, a magnate alternative school in which—oh, the irony!—the “alternative” focus is “academically oriented”).

The school your kids attend sounds to me like a much better one than my daughter’s old school. This gives me hope. But I also want to note that you’re doing a great job getting your children the academic enrichment they crave, and if the school is rigid about their sitting through classes they are well beyond, and you (and your kids) really feel it’s unmanageable to keep on the way you have been, you have a big decision to make. So be prepared for that. Have a plan; don’t go into this without your next steps sketched out. Meanwhile, it will cost you nothing to ask (politely, respectfully, carefully, humbly) for their support in the way you mention. As long as you’re not arrogant about it, as long as you frame it in terms of your children’s specific needs (rather than the school’s unchallenging academics), there’s no reason for anyone at the school to get their back up. The worst they can do is say no, sorry, no exceptions to our rules. (Unless it isn’t the lovely place it seems to be, and there’s a hostile underbelly you haven’t yet seen. Because, trust me, you don’t want to keep your kids in a place like that. I am still deeply regretful I didn’t pull my child out sooner than I did.)

Good luck! And I would love to know how this works out. I’d be so glad to have an anecdote to report about such a request that has a happier outcome than my own.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My father and I have always had a difficult relationship. He and my mother split up when I was 5, and his anger towards her transferred to me. I left his house when I was a young teen and moved in with my mom full-time. We have been in and out of touch ever since. There’s no doubt in my mind that he’s a narcissist, and he may have other, deeper, untreated mental health issues. But he’s getting older and very much wants to have a relationship with me (although I often feel he wants an audience more than a real connection with me).

The number one thing I have asked of him, if we are to be in contact, is not to speak ill of my mother. He just can’t seem to manage that. He’ll keep his thoughts to himself for a bit but then get in a jab so cutting it takes my breath away. My mother died about 18 months ago, so his nastiness about her hurts even more now than it did before. But still, I feel a lot of guilt about not speaking to him. Given his limitations, it seems unlikely he will ever be able to meet my request. My brother, who has a less strained (though not easy) relationship with him, agrees.

And yet, I’m torn up about it. I’d like to either be able to put on a thicker skin and have lunch with him and a chat on the phone every now and then, or else be able to let go of my guilt about not speaking to him. This middle path of not-speaking-and-feeling-bad isn’t serving me.

—Torn Up and Semi-Orphaned

Dear Torn Up,

This is a hard one, because either way of proceeding requires you to become someone you’re not. And in fact both paths require shedding the same self: the sensitive, loving, empathetic one. (People tell those of us who are sensitive to “put on a thicker skin,” but it’s not as easy as that, is it? You feel things deeply. How are you supposed to stop yourself from feeling what you feel?) You’re torn up about cutting your father out of your life entirely because, despite his many faults, you have empathy for him—because you are the sort of person who cares about how others feel. So being able to cut him off without guilt would also require “putting on a thicker skin.”

So let’s try to frame this differently. Since you have (mostly) accepted that he isn’t going to change—that he may try up to a point to abide by your request, but somehow can’t seem to help himself—the question is whether maintaining a (limited, occasional lunch or phone chat) connection with him is important to you. Set aside, just for a moment, your guilt. How much do you care about him? Does it matter to you to have an ongoing connection with him? And if so, why? (Please try a thought experiment, too: If you sever the connection altogether, how do you imagine you will feel upon the news of his death? If the answer to that is relief, that tells you a great deal. But if it’s regret, you may want to move forward differently, if cautiously.)

If you decide that you are going to remain in touch with him—and you are aware, going into it, that he will not reliably respect the boundary around badmouthing your mother—you will need to devise a strategy for your own mental health. Interrupt him and change the subject? Get up and walk away (or hang up on him)? Shift your internal gears and immediately, consciously, stop listening to him and train your mind on something else?

Then see what happens. If the pain of being around him, despite all your efforts, outweighs the pain of cutting ties with him, then tell him, honestly, that this is the case, and say goodbye. But don’t let anybody tell you that there’s an easy solution to what you are dealing with. In life (and especially in relationships), there are rarely circumstances that are as cut and dried as people make them out to be.

—Michelle

More Advice From Slate

I’m a 29-year-old straight cis woman. I have no kids, and in spite of all I read in this column, I’d still like to be a parent in the future. My question is about getting on the same page with my partner about this. He’s a 28-year-old straight cis man who says he’s neutral on having children. Honestly, I don’t think he ever thought about it until we started dating five years ago.