(I've decided to post all of my mental "letters" to my mom. There will probably be a lot of them, as time goes on. At the time of writing this, I'm pregnant and 7 days from my due date. I've had a lot of rough interactions with my mom during the pregnancy, and being pregnant has forced me to confront a lot of ugly things that I'd previously pushed to the back of my mind - because it just wasn't urgent to deal with them. But with a baby on the way, I have to make difficult decisions, it's not just about me anymore. I'm currently very worried about how enforcing boundaries will go once my daughter is born.)
Dear Mom,
I've spent the past decade telling you that your husband will never be allowed near any children I may have in the future. In the past, you'd claim to understand and respect my decision. But like with all of my boundaries and attempts at trying to reason with you, you discarded it as soon as it wasn't convenient for you. I get the idea that in your mind, I'm just rebelling whenever I say these things, you think I say them to "look tough" or because I'm angry, not because I actually believe them. To be honest, I don't think I've ever seen you consistently hold the same opinion on a person, topic, or situation for more than a couple of hours at a time, so maybe you assume that everyone is the same as you in that regard - but believe it or not, we usually mean the things we say. Most people have strong moral principles and convictions that do not change based on their mood.
This boundary has been a very strong and stably held belief for me since I first told you about it. It hasn't changed in 10 years, and it won't change in another 10 years - it's safe for you to assume that it'll never change. There isn't a magic word or a special condition that will force me to make an exception. You always accuse me of being angry when I defy you (which I now know is a manipulation technique), but I'm as calm as I could be as I write this - there is nothing that could ever happen that would create a situation where your husband is allowed near my child, as long as I'm alive. Not even "for a couple of minutes, come on, it's not a big deal" - it is a big deal, and the answers are "no" and "never" - reread that over and over if you delude yourself into thinking that it may have changed again in the future.
Even if he was to superficially "change" some of the more obvious things that bother me about him, it wouldn't make a difference. That ship has sailed - he's had 25 years to figure out how to treat me like a human being and to try to make up for everything he put me through, that's long enough for me to be confident that it's never going to happen. Plus, if I had to put together a list of conditions (and I'm not doing that), it'd include turning himself in to the police, confessing to each crime against me and others individually, and serving jail time for all of them. Medical rehabilitation, therapy, and some form of evidence of a genuine change of character would be required as well. Obviously, since you two won't even admit that anything that happened was immoral and illegal, and both of you have proven time again to be completely incapable of feeling remorse for any of it, we don't need to get into that. There's no point in me continuing to list off the bare minimum that a person like him needs to do in order to begin to make things right. I'm never going to get a genuine apology, and I'm certainly never going to see a genuine change of character from either of you - so I'm moving on to the next topic.
"Er, well... as long as we still have a good relationship!" really said it all. It's like we inhabit different planets. First of all, you and I have never had a good relationship. I could get deep into why this is the case, and one day, I probably will - for now, I'll touch up on some major points. To start off: it's abnormal, unhealthy, and abusive to pressure your minor child into being your "best friend" just because your marriage is bad and you're too mentally unwell to make friends with people your age or people who otherwise have a choice in the matter. Like all kids with bad parents, I just agreed to anything that I thought would keep you from getting angry with me, making threats, and saying cruel things to me. You were a terrible mother, and you utterly lacked the judgment necessary to be in charge of a child's care and upbringing. Trust me - every day that I spent with you filled me with anxiety and dread, which I didn't figure out until those feelings mysteriously disappeared when I got away from you.
That being said, there's one extremely important reason why we never had a good relationship - one that the vast majority of emotionally and mentally healthy people would never need explained to them, because it's so glaringly obvious to us. That is, if you love someone, if you care about their well-being, you would never put them in the situations that you put me in. You would never blame them for being victims of sexual abuse, much less allow for it to happen - we both remember me running to you crying after it happened, calling you before I suspected it'd happen, begging you to make it stop, for you to do something. You knew and you did nothing. This is not just "not good", this is rotten and evil all the way down to it's core.
If a loving and caring mother finds out that her minor child was abused by her husband, she reports her husband to the police, gets a divorce, and does whatever it takes to get the child out of that environment - including living in poverty, going on welfare, working multiple jobs, whatever. Millions of mothers have done exactly that, but you've even admitted to me that you didn't want to have to work full-time and you wanted "nice Christmas presents". Thus, you directly told me that I was worth less than your leather jackets and home decor. Does that sound like a "good relationship" between a mother and her child? If you think so, you're even sicker than I thought.
If I haven't lost you already, I know I will here - in many ways, you're even worse than your husband is. It's mind boggling to me that you genuinely believe that if any abuse happened at his hands, you're totally absolved from any responsibility because you weren't in the room, you weren't the one doing the physical part of the abusing, or "that happened a long time ago". Just so you know, that wouldn't hold up in court - people go to jail all of the time for being accomplices in serious crimes like child sex abuse, which includes creating an environment for it to happen in and covering it up. You always seemed to believe that being a mother was so special and sacred that it automatically made you beyond criticism, that other people would take your side as the "innocent bystander" to everything you let your husband do, and that you could lie your way around any situation where you could be held responsible for your actions. But trust me, women like you are a dime a dozen and so are all of their manipulative techniques and half-brained excuses - the authorities have seen it all, there are millions of people with more or less the same story as me, and your "type" has been documented by psychologists extensively.
Aside from being an accomplice to criminal acts against me, you act like you have no awareness of the emotional and psychological abuse that you put me through. You never showed any maternal warmth towards me, because you always openly "hated children" - I was supposed to be the exception to that, of course, but I obviously wasn't. It was always very clear that any of my age-appropriate behaviors and interests were a nuisance to you, and I was only as good as I could act like a little adult. Playing, talking about things children want to talk about, taking me places children want to go, all of it bothered you. You prided yourself in how you managed to beat me down to the point where I pretended along with you that I "didn't want to do that stuff anyway" - instead, what I totally wanted to do was talk to you as if I was a middle-aged friend. I completely missed out on a childhood because of you - seriously, I can count all of my positive childhood memories on one hand.
Growing up, you tore my self-esteem to shreds, and I have every reason to believe that you did it joyfully. You fattened me up, you made fun of how I looked, and you constantly told me how I really felt about things. You let me get groomed by pedophiles on the internet multiple times, because it meant less time having to deal with me. I was never protected from threats inside or outside of the home. Where loving and caring mothers would have stepped in and put a stop to something, you always allowed it to happen and then blamed me for it, even long before my brain was developed enough to make rational decisions or understand what could go wrong in a given situation - from sleazebag boyfriends to addictive substances, you were always the "cool mom" until I was hurt by your behavior (instead of being impressed like you expected to me), at which point you projected all sorts of bad intentions onto me that would have never crossed my mind had you not said them. You once even told me to produce child pornography of myself to get middle school crushes to like me back, and you suggested that we sell my used underwear to men on the internet for a quick buck when I was 14 years old - and I'm supposed to believe you're all that different from your husband?
Then, as a young adult, you forced me (yes - forced) to be your personal driver, to completely destroy any chance I had for a career, and to otherwise put my life on hold for you. There are milestones and normal experiences I'll never be able to achieve, because you decided that my sole purpose was to entertain you and materially benefit you - who cares what I wanted and needed? As long as you could coerce me into reluctantly saying that I'm fine with it, because I knew better than to be honest with you, all was well. I'm sure it was a "good relationship" for you, though - but for all of those years, I genuinely never thought this hell would end. I did not live for myself until I was 24 years old, and by then, I was emotionally, psychologically, and materially crippled to the point where I doubt I'll ever be able to catch up to my peers.
If I'm being honest with you, I don't want you near my daughter either. You're the same loose cannon that irreversibly damaged me, and I have no reason to believe that you're even capable of changing. Please spare me the sob stories about your rough childhood, which always conveniently came up at times like this - I don't care, I really don't. Also spare me the "you're not remembering it correctly", "what I actually meant was ___", "it wasn't that bad", "that didn't happen", "it was your fault", and all of the other tricks you use to get me back in line - it won't work anymore. After reading this letter, do you really think any reasonable and emotionally healthy parent would let you near their baby? If you do, you've proven again that you lack the mental capacity and moral compass to be around anyone's child - and that's scary, because very few people are so far gone that they're totally unfit to be around any and all children.
Much like with your husband, the ship of ever having a healthy relationship with you has sailed. You, too, had 25 years to figure out how to treat me with dignity and respect. I know you two were looking forward to having another little girl to molest, brainwash, and utterly destroy psychologically - but I'm afraid I'm not throwing my daughter to the dogs, no matter what material benefit could come of it for myself. I know it must really hurt you to read this, but there's absolutely nothing you could do to change my mind, or really anything you could do to "fix the relationship" - the fact of the matter is, my relationship with both of you was broken beyond repair from the beginning. I survived growing up with you - I want my daughter to thrive growing up with me, which means keeping you two away at any cost. Any cost. Including calling the police, getting a restraining order, moving away and changing my phone number.
Lastly, this was all your choice... and your husband's choice, but he didn't force you to do anything, you chose to do it all together because you're perfect for each other, almost as if you were the same person with the exact same thoughts. This all happened the way it did because you behaved in ways that caused it to happen the way it did - the only thing that went wrong is that I didn't comply into adulthood the way you did when your parents tried all of these same nasty tricks on you. It's not America's fault, it's not my religion's fault, it's not my priest's fault, it's not my husband's fault, it's not because "it's trendy to make up stories of being abused", it's not because I've "been reading stupid things on the internet", or any of the other nonsense you've tried to excuse all of this with - it's your fault. You did this. I don't owe it to you to try to explain to you what you did wrong, to try to "fix" you (as if that was even possible), to tell you what to do for you to try to "fix everything" to give you opportunities to "prove yourself" - you've made your bed, now lie in it. I'm not sorry.
Yours truly, the Unpleasant Tough Girl