Michele Yulo reflects on the impact of finding out about her father's philandering:
All those years I suspected my father had been unfaithful during the marriage, but nothing prepared me for the truth. The fact that he couldn’t tell me himself made it worse especially because we were so close. I am now 46 years old, a wife and mother, but am still learning the hard lessons of what it is to be human. One of those lessons is the often difficult realization that parents are human with separate lives that include their own misfortunes and mistakes. My father lived a life in which he could not escape his past, nor could he live with it. And I knew that. But, as adults, how much do we really want to know about our parents’ past? And when we discover their indiscretions, how do we fit that into our already fixed version of our youth? These are questions that inevitably and often get answered by default—in a sense, we have no choice but to allow our parents’ mistakes to become part of understanding who we are, as well as the realities of the world we were not exposed to as children.
The Dish 