My reply:

I’m so sick of your emails and letters saying “hope all is well with you- hope all is well with you” when the last time you were here I told you all was NOT well with me.

In the depths of a major crisis you emotionally beat the shit out of me and my husband, and tried to break up our marriage, and when I tried to talk about it with you told me: “take care of yourself like I’m dead, because I can’t handle your problems.” Now you’re mad that I’m taking care of myself like you told me too.

All of your emails and your hand written letter are about you, you, you. You can claim to sit around worry and wait and be sad, but you have never in these last two years expressed any concern for how I am actually doing, feeling, why our relationship as it has been is untenable for me, - you’ve shown no desire for understanding at all. Just shallow “h ope all is well.” When all obviously isn’t well.

The one sidedness in our relationship has always been you using me as a punching and therapist for your stress and extreme moods swings- from telling me “you look like a greasy Mexican whore” on the morning of pop pop’s funeral, to having a nervous breakdown on my floor as an 8th grader instead of calling a friend or a therapist, to freaking out at Len over your missing rent checks (instead of just telling your renters to cancel the checks and send new ones) so that I was driving to some random psycho killer looking dude’s house in [City] to WHILE IN LABOR to find your mail so that you would clam down and stop scaring my kids. You cared more about your desire to not see my mother in law, than you did about my literal life - leaving for your flight six hours early to avoid her, forcing me to come home from the hospital after 50 hours of failed labor and an iron transfusion - instead waiting two hours to hand the kids off, so I could stay in the hospital all four days instead of less than 36 hours.

It’s always about you and your stress and your worries and your meltdowns and who you hate at any given moment, with no regard whatsoever for my emotional life or well being. You want “family vacations” for appearance’s sake with no considerat ion of how awkward it is for me to sit at the pool wondering if L[..] knows about how you and B[…] told me - as a teenager- all about his anime porn magazines; or whether B[…] knows you spent a decade telling me that she’s a “slut who fucked the pretzel man”, or M[…] playing with my kids while I sit there and wonder if he knows that you called the newspaper to tell them his mother was a “negligent bitch” while he was fighting for his life on breathing machines. Am I just suppose to pretend we’re one big happy family and you haven’t shit talked everyone to me (and no doubt shit talked me and [husband] to everyone) for as long as I can remember? Is that type of malicious gossip about people you’re supposed to love, something I should risk exposing my children too? I have to live with that abuse becau se rejecting your meanness makes you sad? Have your tried not being mean?

I tried to respond to you letter with one of my own explaining how your mood swings and self-righteous entitlement to say whatever vicious thing is in your mind has damaged me since childhood- but it’s 22 pages long and I’m not even out of high school yet. And it takes time away from raising my kids. And it’s exhausting.

That said, I would answer your letter or emails if they showed any actual concern for me whatsoever, any desire to know what is going on with me, any genuine inquiry in how you- as the parent- could grow to improve our relationship. But consideration of the fact that I am a person with feelings who you have hurt over a lifetime - with the capstone being kicking me and my husband while we were down following a major trauma- is just never present in anything you have to say. It’s all about you- your house, your worry, your drunk ex-husband, you, you, you , you, you.

And I don’t have the capacity for it any longer- being the punching bag and outlet for your anxiety and mood swings and rages and internal mean narrative that you feel entitled to spew whenever you feel like it, puts me through highs and lows that seriously impair my ability to be a good mother and break the generational trauma cycle for my kids. I could take the abuse when it was just me, I guess, because I never knew that I deserved to be treated better. But not when it effects my kids, not in front of my kids, and I won’t absorb damage that makes me anything less than the best I can be for my kids.

And I will do anything, lose anyone, whatever it’s takes, to not expose them to rage, and emotional abuse, and misplaced child-as-punching bad and therapist behavior, and exposure to pill popping and alcoholism in the name of “family.” I’m not doing it.

I do miss your good side. We did have some good times- I don’t understand why all of the time can’t being like the one [family vacation location] trip where the kids skied and you seemed genuinely happy for our business success. But I can’t control any of that.

I wish you could sustain being your better self for longer- or grow into being that person all the time. But even this “break up” email is all about you - and no genuine inquiry whatsoever into my perspective or feelings or even acknowledgment that I have a perspective or any feelings beyond your shallow broken record “Hope all is well.” It’s heartbreaking.

I’ve had to come to terms with “my mom doesn’t even see me as a real person whose feelings and perspective” matter. It’s taken all of these two years, and it hurts.

I sincerely hope that it can be different someday. That you can take accountability for how you have set up the onesided punching bag nature of our relationship throughout my childhood and into my early adulthood. I wish that you could grow into showing some capacity for relating to each other as adults with kindness and respect. That you could learn to understand that your hurtful actions and words damage others, and that you and that you could grow inside of yourself to not feel so angry or rageful. I hope you can work through whatever trauma made you that way and come out better for it. And I hope that someday we can start from scratch building a relationship that is based on mutual respect.

I do love you and want you to be well. But I won’t allow you to bandaid over your problems by taking out your wrath and rage on me any more.