Growing Up with an Unfaithful Father in 1980s London
Emma Fowle's parents were childhood sweethearts who met on a council estate in Essex at age fourteen. They married in 1971 when they were just nineteen years old. By the time Emma arrived six years later, her father was embarking on a long and successful powerlifting career. Throughout her childhood, her parents appeared exceptionally happy. Her father owned a building company while her mother managed the books. The 1980s building boom and rapidly gentrifying London suburbs brought prosperity to the family. They enjoyed a holiday home in Spain and a Jaguar XJS parked on their driveway.
The Downward Spiral Begins
In her final year of primary school, Emma's father won his first world title. In 1988, he traveled to South Africa seeking gold and returned home a celebrated champion. The family celebrated with parties, banners, local awards, and newspaper coverage. However, less than two years later, their world completely collapsed. Unknown to the family, her father had started taking anabolic steroids, initially provided by someone at the gym to help with an injury. Since many others were using them, he saw no harm. Already phenomenally strong—a teenage polymath who excelled at nearly all sports—the steroids altered something fundamental within him.
Building muscle mass and aiding recovery allowed him to train longer and harder, which became his primary focus. Amphetamines followed, first for competitions and then more regularly. Finally, cocaine entered the picture, becoming what Emma describes as "the nail in the coffin of all that was good and lovely in our lives." Initially, his drug-taking remained hidden, but the financial strain forced him to work as a nightclub bouncer. This transition led to a strange, nocturnal existence, common among his training peers who did cash-in-hand door work. The nights on the door combined with days at work and evenings in the gym created increasing distance from his family.
Affairs and Abandonment
Somewhere along this chaotic path, with drugs clouding his judgment and time spent apart from his family growing, he began an affair. Almost two years after winning his world title, Emma's father walked out for the first time, leaving a Dear John letter for her mother and £500 in an envelope. Days later, her mother discovered he had fled to South Africa with his girlfriend and £35,000 of their savings in cash. They were just weeks away from a house move that he had claimed was necessary due to an impending recession and struggling business. In reality, he had depleted their finances and could no longer maintain a normal job, a wife, a mistress, and the chaos of addiction.
Over the next three years, her father came and left repeatedly, more times than anyone can accurately recall. When Emma first learned about his affair in 1990 on Bonfire Night, she was thirteen years old. Two weeks before he left that initial time, she stood in a field and threatened him with everything she could imagine to make him stay, warning he would miss her graduation, wedding, and grandchildren. Each time he returned, her mother would take him back, patiently explaining that this was not the man she had married—it was the drugs that had messed with his mind.
Miraculous Recovery and Reconciliation
Then, miraculously, he got clean. This makes it sound like a neat, easy story when it was anything but. Amid the turmoil, Emma found faith, and one by one, her family followed, including her father. His recovery began in earnest, and he spent six months convincing her mother to give him one final chance. Eventually, after three years of chaos, her parents had their marriage vows blessed in August 1993, coinciding with their 22nd wedding anniversary. They have remained together ever since.
The Lingering Scars on Emma's Own Marriage
It felt like no small miracle that when Emma pledged her life to another in 2002, her father sat next to her in the car, walked her down the aisle, and delivered a beautiful speech that moved everyone to tears. There seemed to be no hint of baggage from her childhood. However, while she had forgiven her father, it had left a mark she could not yet fully comprehend. For the longest time, she was neither able to give nor receive fidelity. The first man she was ever faithful to was her husband, but she could not trust his faithfulness in return.
"This is the gift of a broken home, even one that is eventually, miraculously restored—a messed-up perception of what love is," Emma reflects. She felt that love would inevitably be flawed and vulnerable, not sturdy enough to bear the weight of a lifetime together. In the early years of her marriage, she told her husband, "It's OK. If you have an affair, we'll get through it. As long as we're honest with one another." Her twisted logic was that if her parents' marriage was vulnerable, every marriage must be. When they moved to Cornwall and he began commuting to London for a few days each week, her insecurities intensified.
The Breaking Point and Therapy
When their eldest daughter was born in 2005, the dam fully breached. "You could blame it on hormones or sleep deprivation, but there really is no excuse for looking your own, perfectly good and kind husband in the eye and foretelling, without a hint of irony or doubt, the day that he will leave not only you, but your newborn child too," Emma admits. Her husband responded gently, "Emma, I think we might need to talk to someone before this becomes a problem we can't fix."
Fifteen years after her father's abandonment, Emma began therapy. For a decade and a half, she had carried half-buried, subconscious fears without realizing their impact on her relationships. Research supports her experience. The Journal of Family Issues reported that children whose parents were unfaithful are twice as likely to be unfaithful themselves. Clinical psychologist Ana Nogales, author of Parents Who Cheat, found that 70 percent of such individuals said the infidelity they experienced as children affected their ability to trust others. This represents the often-unseen consequence of living through a marital breakup, even one that is eventually restored.
The Path to Forgiveness and Healing
"But how did you forgive?" is the question most often directed at her mother, mainly from other women who have suffered the stunning pain of deceit, but also to Emma and her brother. The intervening years have taught her that there are no easy answers. Finding the grace to look one another in the eye, forgive, and choose to move past what happened was surely miraculous. It also required time, counseling, and the long consolation of years. Healing came fast and hard all at once, yet slowly too. It involved examining all that needed to be dismantled before something new could be rebuilt—something that could, this time, bear the weight of a lifetime without buckling under the strain.
For his part, Emma knows her father will live forever with the pain of knowing how much he hurt them all and how difficult it was to find healing from that. However, she is grateful they have healed and that she now gets to create a different future for her own children—one that does not bear the scars of infidelity.
