My Husband Walks Naked Around Our Home, and I’m Afraid for Our Children

My loving husband and I have been married for some time now, and together we have four amazing children. They are so important to us. Four kids. Biologically, I have three with him. The fourth is his daughter from a previous relationship. He and his ex-girlfriend, the baby mama, broke up a long time ago.

You know how exes sometimes try to weave their way back into your life? Well, she tried. But it didn’t succeed, because what God cannot do simply doesn’t exist. I hear she has moved on, married, and is building her own family now. But her child, my husband’s daughter, stays with us, alongside my own children. We are a loving family; no trouble there.

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My problem, however, is a different kind of trouble. It lives in the small, daily moments of our home. My husband is always…well, raw around the edges. Naked, to be plain. He walks around the house completely naked. When he’s going to bathe, he’s naked. When he brushes his teeth, he’s naked. On the toilet? You guessed right, naked. We live in a self-contained apartment with two bedrooms, but we all share one washroom. The building only has one. He is naked in the bedroom, in the hall, and when bathing. And when he baths, he doesn’t even close the bathroom door. So if you pass by, you see literally everything.

Now, another layer has been added to this worry. My stepdaughter is fourteen years old, and she is walking in the same character. Like father, like daughter. She goes to the bathroom naked too. Around the house, she often wears only pants and a bra. I have told her several times to use a cloth, a robe, anything to cover herself when she goes to the bathhouse, but she doesn’t listen. She prefers to go naked. This scares me. My other children are watching, and they may learn from this. I am so worried it has given me sleepless nights.

A little more context: ours is a distance marriage because of my work as a nurse. When I am away, I send my three younger children to my mom’s place for care, while my stepdaughter stays here with her dad. This arrangement, paired with the nudity, makes me deeply uncomfortable when I’m gone. I don’t want to think the worst. Maybe there is nothing going on at all. But should a father see his teenage daughter’s nakedness? Should she see his? Shouldn’t there be some sort of boundaries? I ask myself, is my husband that kind of man? I don’t know. The wondering is a heavy weight.

I have spoken to my husband about this several times. He turns a deaf ear. I even asked his brother to talk to him, but it proved futile. The silence on his end is a wall.

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So here I am, asking not just as a wife but as a mother protecting her nest: How do I solve this? How do I speak to him in a way that finally makes him hear me, without it shaking the foundation of our family? How do I guard my children’s sense of modesty and safety? How do I install boundaries where the doors themselves have been left open?

—Mavis

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