How to tell your children that you cheated?

[UndoRedo]

This is the crux of the issue, although it's a little more complicated than that as one child already knows as they read through my Whatsapp messages with my ex DH and confronted me. They want me to tell their sibling so they both know the whole story of why their parents divorced. Children are 13 and 16 and been divorced 3 years. I never guessed my youngest DC would go through my message history, but apparently they were searching for answers about when and how the relationship failed.

I think I need to give a little context so this isn't a drip feed, and I need some advice on how much I share with older DC.

My marriage has mostly been happy, were together for about 15 years, had children and while DH was a good father and we were good friends there had always been certain issues. He was lazy, did nothing around the house to the point that when I needed to go away for a week for work about 10 years in I had to write down instructions incase he had to use washing machine. That's on me, I should have pushed back more. Then there were the cutting, sarcastic comments, little jokes at my expense that as the kids got older they began to copy. And the sex had always been awful. I'd always meant to address it, say what I needed, say I wanted to feel desired and actually receive pleasure, but somehow I could never find the words.

Until, one day I did. I said what I felt, and needed and was told that he didn't like things any other way than the way they were, and if I wasn't happy I could leave. And that meant breaking up my family and I wasn't brave enough, or felt I had any support systems or finances to do that. So I backed down.

He made me feel really unattractive, wouldn't touch my body even during sex. I don't know how I put up with it with so long, but I had. And one night I took his hand and put it on my body, and his erection immediately disappeared and something in me broke. I sobbed while he slept and knew I needed more, needed to feel at least once how it would feel to be wanted. It seems self indulgent I know, but at the time my mental health was in tatters, and I felt trapped by my need for this, and not wanting to destroy my children's lives. So I went onto a website and met someone in a similar situation and spent the next 9 months in an affair. It was all consuming, wonderful, awful, living two lives. And I went to therapy to understand how I'd ended up there.

My AP decided he had to work on things with his wife, and we ended things. And I knew that without an affair I couldn't bear my marriage. I had tried, DH continued to want sex, I made excuses because the idea of it gave me panic attacks. I blamed menopause,sleepless children, anything.

He complained, and in the end broke into my phone one evening and then confronted me. The affair had ended by that point, I had already decided I had to leave and told him so. There was justified anger, messages about me being a slut, and then he wanted us to work through it, do therapy together although when I had suggested it months before he'd refused to. I left, and we co parented. Over the last few years he's told the kids the divorce was all my doing, hinted to the children that I did a very bad thing. And I've known one day I'd have to be brave enough to admit to them what I did.

He's got a new partner, I'm single still.

I should have left before I cheated, and while I have never regretted leaving my marriage, I do grieve for the years I had with my family unit as one.

I'm terrified my eldest will hate me for cheating. How do I have this conversation in the next few weeks? How much or how little do I share, or would it just seem like me trying to justify the u
njustifiable?

First I don't understand why you have saved anything relating to the affair in your phone anyway. So delete it all now.

But you did and its out now and as the younger knows it probably us best you tell the other too.

Just explain you had been terribly unhappy in your relationship with their Dad and rather than accept this and leave at that time you did have a fling for a short while and although that didn't lead to a permanent relationship it brought you to your senses that your relationship with Dad was not going to get better and it was better for it to end and so you did. Indeed Dad is now in a new relationship.

It has been 3 years and although there will be some initial upset (and brace yourself) you can explain you thought they would be too young to understand at the time but it is good now they are older and more mature and now that it has been 3 years since the split that they are aware that noone needs to remain in a relationship in which they are unhappy.

I’m sorry, I meant to quote @Mrsttcno1

It’s a pity children ‘take sides’ at all. Your husband should not have walked the children through your messages, absolutely not, but hopefully you have not countered this with the long list of grievances about him in your original post, that you are using to justify your choice to join a website to look for and have an extramarital affair. Their heads will be all over the place.
OP most of your post was a long justification of your infidelity. There isn’t one. Neither your husband, no matter what his shortcomings, nor your crumbling marriage were responsible for you making that choice. You were.
You knew the honest thing to do but for ‘keeping the family together’ reasons you chose not to do it.
If you were that desperate to keep your family together, why on earth risk having an affair, the one thing pretty much guaranteed to blow families apart? It makes no sense.
I’d warrant that you wanted the security provided by your marriage, were not brave enough to face ending the relationship and the upset to your children, then resented the heck out of your decision to stay (and your husband) and thereby felt entitled to go looking for your own happiness elsewhere.
All of this was about your needs and your happiness, not your children’s. Every message, date and hook up risked their happiness, risked a bitter divorce and the family break up you wanted to avoid, and their good opinion of you.
Everything you say about your husband and marriage might well be true (we only have your account of his part in the deterioration of your marriage) but it’s still no excuse to have an affair. He was honest when you told him how you felt, you had a clear choice, he said nothing was going to change.
Staying to keep your family together in a strained relationship would not have been ideal, but choosing to stay in a strained relationship and ‘solve’ your unhappiness by organising yourself an affair was only ever going to complicate things.
At some point posters will tell you life isn’t that black and white, you can’t just leave, but you actually can and eventually did anyway after making things worse.
In the absence of the truth about something that blew your life up, you would go looking for answers. Children will do the same.
How much they are entitled to know and what is age appropriate will vary, but they need and deserve an answer that they can understand and are satisfied with. I think a child of that age knew what they were doing with your phone was wrong, but they desperately needed to know. Children can turn things inwards and wonder if mum or dad preferred being with somebody else than them or their family because they themselves had done something wrong or because you didn’t want them any more. This needs really careful handling and reassurances without bad-mouthing the other parent, no matter how tempting or justified. Be careful this doesn’t turn into a war where your children hear your version and your husband’s and are in agony trying to remain loyal to you both. Whilst your child talks to you, they might reassure you that they are ‘on your side’ because they don’t want to lose you and then their dad tells them his version and they’re on his side because they don’t want to lose contact with him either.
Wherever blame for the marriage breakdown lies (usually in two places, not one) the blame for the affair is yours alone.
To try to justify cheating at all sends children the wrong message.
I genuinely hope they come out of this with a good relationship with both of you and more respect for you for admitting that you did something wrong without blaming their father for a decision that was your unilateral choice.

To everyone saying it’s none of the kids’ business- it really is now, it’s their everything now unfortunately, ditto saying about the 13yo blackmailing or reading messages, they’re a kid and saw something about their mum- their world, they’re just trying to deal with it. People need to stop acting like they’re adults, they’ve just had their world upended (not saying it’s right, but it’s literally the worst thing that could have happened in their world, my friend’s parents broke up due to infidelity when she was 18, it absolutely changed her)

My ex was clear months before I cheated, if I wouldn't sleep with him, the marriage was over anyway. If I could go back in time I'd let him leave.

For what it’s worth, my kids as young adults found out their dad cheated on me and nothing has changed.. I think they just begin to realise shit happens.

The infidelity isn’t about him, or what ultimatums he set, it’s about you. Nobody forced you, you made a wrong decision with no help from anybody else. What’s done is done.
You can’t go back in time, we all wish we could at some point or other, nobody’s perfect, but I think you’d get more sympathy if you’d said ‘If I could go back in time I wouldn’t have cheated’ rather than ‘I’d have let him
leave’, because again, you’ve abdicated responsibility for staying or leaving back to him. You blame your marriage and him for your choice to cheat and now wish he’d left of his own accord earlier to save you and your children all this.
You both need to accept your parts in the breakdown of the marriage, put the crap behind you and most importantly, put the children’s welfare first and make sure they don’t feel forced to take sides or choose. Be the best parents and role models for them you can be, despite being apart. That really is all that matters, not he said/ she said or who was worse, that’s irrelevant to them, all they want at the end of the day is to love you both and you to love them. Their life will be a lot easier going forward if you pull this off, they’ll feel secure again and their hurt will heal a lot faster.

You didn't have the finances to break up the marriage so you had an affair instead. Lets not try to pretend you did all this for the children's sake.

You need to take responsibility when you speak to your eldest - which you don't seem to be doing right now. You were very unhappy and you did completely the wrong thing and you really regret the poor choices you made. Don't make excuses or try to justify it - just be clear you were very, very wrong.