Sounds like your mother was afraid to talk to your dad about the finances of the family for her own fears of him or she would have shared the information so that he wouldn't have been doing the overspending.......your parents relationship was obviously dysfunctional....& it's that dysfunctional behavior that you learned from, not just that one isolated situation.

We do learn from the dysfunction & swear that we will NOT make the same mistakes that our parents made. However by virtue of swearing that, we end up making just as fatal other mistakes because we are only human & basically try to do only the best that we can given the circumstances that we are living with.

I grew up with totally dysfunctional parents & swore that I would never be like them or EVER get married to ANYONE like my father figured I was better off alone than living a life like theirs so I was going to get MY education. I did end up getting married, but fighting to NOT be anything like my parents.....& made a whole set of other bad choices & bad ways of handling things trying hard NOT to be like them.....but I also ended up with a totally dysfunctional H......I have now learned why, but it made the 33 years I was with him like hell & the fights were never ending......& our daughter ended up growing up in that environment.....which was just as bad if not worse than what I grew up in....but she had parents who both had their careers while trying hard to continually be there for her when she needed me.

Sometimes we look back & see all the horrible things that our parents did to us & how bad their life was......but the sad thing is that they were just trying to survive & get by the best they could also.....& most times they didn't have the therapy that we have had to be able to analyze & make the changes necessary to fix the problems.

The fact that your mother paid you back with interest says a lot for her character IMO......yes, she scared you into not saying anything....but honestly, that may have been exactly how she felt about your father & she might have been afraid to say anything....for what he might do. When we really don't know a person (& yes, we don't always know our spouses that well), we don't always know just how they will react & the fact that she didn't EVER say anything to him about the finances was probably because something happened at one point that either made her afraid to say anything or he was incapable of truly understanding the financial end of the family.

I know I looked at my parents & their life & honestly if I hadn't been their only child, I would have been gone at the age of 13 when I wanted to get my own apartment because I hated my home & my parents. Honestly it wasn't until my mother was able to open up & express some of the things from both their pasts that I was better able to feel empathy for what & why they were the way they were. It didn't make me like it any better but at least I had some level of understanding for why they were the way they were.

I'm finding that with my own bad marriage that I left 7 years ago after 33 years of fighting & struggles.....only after I left & have done some research on input that others have given me as to why they thought he was the way he was have I come to understand that it does explain 100% why he is the way he is.........I can't live with it.....but at least I understand that some of his actions just are who & what he is & not that it was a specific choice to act that way. It has helped me with my anger toward him.....I say helped because still every time I have to deal with him or see the stupidity that he's doing the anger swells up again & I have to remind myself that his problem is not an excuse, but it does explain why he reacts in the ways that he does.....& the anger does subside to mostly non-existent.

You don't want to take to your mother.....but she might just be able to provide for you some understanding of where & why she was coming from where she was when that happened.......I know that I looked at my parents with a black veil between us & everything they did was covered in a darkness that until I was able to see them in the light that truly existed, I wasn't able to have the understanding or the empathy for why they did things the way they did.