#Housewife's astonishing story of how she left her husband and children by running off with a gay nanny#

Big day: Michele Macfarlane on her wedding day to Marizelle Topham in South Africa in 2009

At first glance, it’s a familiar cliche. A happy, prosperous family hires an attractive au pair to help look after the children, only to find that the young Mary Poppins rapidly becomes a cuckoo in the nest.

When Michele Macfarlane, her husband Peter and their three young children swapped their cramped terraced home in Buckinghamshire for a new life near Cape Town’s Table Mountain, she thought their spacious new home – a main house and two cottages on a two-acre plot in the suburbs complete with swimming pool – would bring them an enviable, outdoorsy lifestyle they could never afford in Britain.
Instead, her happy Home Counties family was split by sexual infatuation, infidelity and a bitter, cataclysmic divorce prompted by the presence of their Afrikaans home help.

But this domestic drama has a new and most unexpected twist in its tale: it was Michelle’s husband Peter, a successful cranio-sacral chiropractor with a flourishing practice at a luxury Cape Town health club, who was left sobbing and heartbroken.
Michele, after 15 years of marriage, found herself falling head-over-heels in love with their attractive 23-year-old nanny, Marizette Topham.

Now 44, Michele has written a sexually explicit memoir of the explosive lesbian affair that not only ended her marriage, but tore apart  the close bond she shared with her children Jacob, now 20, Hannah, 18,  and Eden, 12. They were left angry and bewildered by their mother’s decision to leave their father for the nanny.
Her autobiographical book – I Left My Husband For The Au Pair – graphically portrays the emotional turmoil of the family and the Michele’s sexual awakening and subsequent (unsuccessful) marriage to Marizette.

It has made Michele an unlikely figurehead for gay rights activists in South Africa. Many would argue, however, that her frankness is a second betrayal of her family, who have now been exposed to their mother’s sexual preferences in a way that most children never have to face.
Peter last night refused to comment on the book and Michele accepts she damaged the people she loves most.

Source Dailymail