DEAR ANNIE

DEAR ANNIE:

I’m a recently divorced man in his mid-60s. I have no children and am secure in my job. I’ve been on a couple of dates since my divorce that haven’t gone well.

One day, I ran into one of the nurses I met while I was in rehab after my stroke in 2016. We became friends and shared intimate details about our private lives with each other. She spent many nights after she got off work crying on my shoulder and generally not wanting to go home to her fiance.

One Saturday, I ran into her in the grocery store. After sharing a longer than normal embrace and quickly bringing each other up to speed on our life changes, we agreed to meet for dinner later that night. I picked her up, and off to dinner we went. Then we went to a movie. On the drive home, I ended up offering her the extra room in my town house as a place to stay until she figured out what she wanted to do about her situation. She accepted and began moving her stuff in the next day with my help.

While she was getting settled in, before going to work one day, she left me a note saying she would be late coming home from work that night. When she got home after 2 a.m., she was in tears and could barely talk. After finally getting her to calm down, she wrapped her arms around me and asked if she could sleep with me, and I said yes and went back to sleep.

She’s been living here almost a year, and we get along almost too well. We stayed in last weekend, and after we both had too many beers, we ended up having the most enjoyable sex either of us have had in recent memory. Earlier today, she introduced me to a friend as her boyfriend while we were out running errands.

I’m conflicted about raising our friendship to the next level until I’m 100% sure I’m ready for another serious relationship. She’s got a great personality and is funny, caring, a great cook and very compassionate when need be. My major stumbling block is age. I’m old enough to be her dad. She doesn’t look like she’s in her mid-30s but like a woman much older than she actually is. I’ll also say she turns me on when she lets her hair down on her days off. (She’s required to have her hair up at work.)

Your thoughts, please!

— Thinking in His 60s DEAR THINKING: Solid friendships are often great seeds from which romantic relationships can blossom. But before things can grow in either capacity, you and this woman need to get on the same page. Considering the dynamic you two have had this past year — and now having been physically intimate with each other — it’s not unreasonable for her to think you’re interested in something more serious, even if you haven’t explicitly given things a label.

Start the conversation and see where things go. Explain your reservations and ask about her expectations. Don’t pay too much mind to the age difference or what other people may think of your relationship. What’s important is that you make each other happy and are aligned in what you’re looking for. With open communication, honesty and grace, it’s very possible that your bond with this woman can reach new heights.

DEAR ANNIE: I just read today’s “Second Chance Daughter” column about “putting away the bitterness, regret and anger of growing up with an abusive mom.” Her dad wasn’t much better; he deliberately never stepped forward to intervene on his daughter’s behalf.

My sister, brother and I never went to our father and told him about what was going on when he was away on his long-distance job as a sea captain. Before he was due to come home (only four times a year), my mother would admonish us to “make things nice for Daddy.” Of course we did. We loved our father, and we knew he loved us. I remember one time when he said, “You’re good kids.” Music to our souls. He spent a great amount of his “in port” and vacation time with us. He played with us and participated in activities with us, whereas our mother would sit in the car and read while we played at a park or ice-skated at a rink.

Looking back on my childhood and teen years, I realize that my mom was mentally ill. However, that was after I was married with three children. During my upbringing, we children believed that we were “rotten to the core, so rotten we smelled.” And we believed and felt so guilty that we had “ruined” our mother’s life. We listened over and over to the litany of, “I wish to God you’d never been born!” I can still see in my mind’s eye my sister sniffing her forearm, hoping she, and others, couldn’t smell her “rottenness.”

The older I grew, the more I became determined to leave our crazy home. I went to college as far away from home as possible while still paying in-state tuition. It wasn’t until I had children of my own, and never once felt the feelings of hate and regret at having children, that I realized my mother was mentally ill.

How did I deal with my situation? I emotionally separated myself from my mother at an early age. I was very close to my father and emotionally supported myself with his love and devotion. Although I didn’t know anything about mental illness, even as a young child I knew that I didn’t want a relationship with someone who despised me and my siblings.

As I grew into my teen years, I constantly researched avenues of escape via far-away colleges. When I told my mother about my distant college of choice, she said, “If you leave this house, you’re never coming back again.” Ever the respectful daughter, I did not say, “That’s the plan, Mom.” I didn’t say a word, but I bought a one-way ticket and left. The married older sister of a good friend took me in and let me stay a few weeks till I had two jobs and fulltime student enrollment status at a university. I never looked back. No regrets.

— Happy Adult Daughter DEAR HAPPY ADULT DAUGHTER: Wow. Thank you sharing your story with our readers. It gives a very detailed account of the harm and trauma that can result when an untreated mentally ill mother is left alone with children. You are a warrior. So strong to know that you had to survive a house with so much emotional and physical abuse. Your mother called you rotten because she felt rotten to the core. But instead of internalizing that you were rotten to the core like many children sadly do, you were able to emotionally distance yourself from your mother and see that it was her and not you as a child. That takes people years of therapy to see, and you saw it in your teens. Congratulations for your incredible resilience and determination to thrive in life and be happy.