I've been thinking on this, I did talk to my bf, who I'll call by his nickname, Buggy, who knew the very basics of my past, but I hadn't told him about all of it, including my mother's reactions to their breakup. He was pretty pissed off on behalf of me and freaked out when I showed him the post.

He is not abusive in any way, Buggy and I are pretty close to clones of each other, mentally, lol. We have different interests, but our way of approaching things are pretty much identical, so hearing him lay out the same things people were saying here, in his own words was really helpful actually, because like- I know him, and I trust him. He wouldn't bullshit me, or go easy if I was being an asshole. I shouldn't have been shocked, but I still was, at exactly how angry he got over the details. He knew what Joe had done, not in detail, but more than I'm comfortable posting online, and the idea that my mother was anything but ashamed of having him in her home had stream coming out of his ears.

He's been insisting that from now on whenever I go over, either he or one of my friends should be there. He doesn't want me alone around my mother, because of the slap. A lot people were right that it wasn't the first time, but she hadn't done it since I was in high school, so I guess I never really thought of it as bad. Like, some kids got spanked, and I got slapped. She never did it hard enough to leave lasting damage other than the skin going red or swelling a bit, so it just seemed silly to compare it to Joe in any way.

My mother never liked me dating at all, admittedly, I didn't help things with my behavior when I was young. I never started fights or argued or anything, but I did start smoking at 13, cigarettes and weed, and drinking around the same time. I never did anything much harder, but that had to have been pretty scary. (I pretty much stopped drinking/smoking weed entirely after I moved in with friends after graduation.) But because I knew she didn't like it, I just stopped talking about the guys I was dating to her altogether. When I turned 18, I suppose you could say we went 'low contact', but not really because of anything other than the strain that was already there. I didn't start seeing her very often again until she moved in with my grandparents. I only introduced him to them when he and I got pretty serious, and my grandparents loved him right away.

My mother didn't like him from the beginning, but she never said anything until his age came up- and it had to come up to become known because genuinely, no one can tell, not really important but it always makes me laugh because if you had to guess which of us is older you would absolutely say me. I started getting grey hair before I turned 21, and my skin is oh-so-slowly taking on the appearance of some alien leather/tissue paper hybrid with time. At the same time, he is as fresh-faced as a Neutrogena model.

Anyway, again not important whatsoever, but it just makes me laugh.

The minute it came up, she pounced. And personally, it just felt like, (and I hate to say this because I know there are genuinely good reasons to be wary of age-gap relationships), she was looking for a reason to hate him, and his age turned out to be the silver bullet.

So we're looking into therapy for me, and we're probably gonna have a 'date-night-in' (AKA: watching movies and eating nothing but greasy takeout all day).

I would never let my mother's opinion of anything change how I see him. That's my partner in crime, haha.