There are a couple of strands to this so please excuse what may be a horribly long post.
Last year, after much soul-searching shopped his dad to the police. DH knew his dad had child pormn when he was a child, but as he'd left home 15 years earlier was unsure whether his dad was still into it. DH and his brothers treated all this as a bit of a sick "in-joke". However DH finally decided to go to the police when his dad remarried to a woman he met on the internet who had a very young 12 year old daughter. The police found child porn on his dad's hard drive and some other stuff. The case goes to court in Jan and DH is a witness as his dad is trying to claim that the porn was a recent, accidenntal discovery. The case has hit the local papers this week.
DH's mum is awful. she has her head up her bum and is essentially the sort of person who gives Guardian readers a bad name. Her initial response to this was to pretend that she knew nothing about the child porn ( a lie) and to inform DH that she had been drugged and gang-raped by some bloke she had an affair with. Somehow DH's dad was involved in this too. however, she rang DH saying how embarrassed she was about her ex being in the papers (what will the neighbours say?) and DH decided to tell her what he thimnks (they do not have a close relationship). DH is angry with his mum for generally being a lousy mother and also for failing to protect him as a child. There was a lot of hardcore porn lying around the house when DH was a child, as well as the kiddy stuff and it seriously affected DH at the time. His mum has said that he's being "hung-up" abut porn, as it's quite natural and that he shouldn't have been looking anyway (at 6 years of age, if you're told not to look, what do you do?) She has also claimed that she was "abused" by her parents because they were very strict baptists and wuldn't discuss sex at all. His mum has also revealed that DH's dad was abused by his dad, which went down esp badly because they used to send DH to stay with his G'pa on his own.
DH is considering cutting off all contact with his mum (which I really wish he would) but there is a big part of him that craves a "normal", close family. This is prob made worse because i have a good relationship with my relatives. I don't know what to say to help, because he knows I despise his mum, (risk of him thinking that i'm using this mess to forward my own agenda)but it's unbearable seeing him like this. He's drinking heavily and is really quite depressed. He knows he should see a counsellor but refuses to go because work is so hectic.
To make things worse, he's very unhappy at work, took the job because it was the sensible thing to do, but the place is a bit step-down for him, intellectually. He's also having to "commute" (only 5 miles, but takes 45 min in rush hour) which he loathes. Last night he announced he was going to apply for another job and then went nuts when I pointed out that we would have to live in a s**hole if he got it (job is in South-East). I know he needs my support, but I don't what to do, and I'm not happy to go along with some of his life-changing ideas which are basically not very well thought through, just because he needs to be kept happy at the moment.
Sorry, needed to get it off my chest.