u/Delicious_Clock_399

Hi everyone!! I am LC with my family (mom, dad, & sister) and having the worst guilt (?) and feelings surrounding Mother’s Day.

I have a 16 month old daughter and I have had to spend all major holidays + her birthday working around my mother and sisters hatred of anyone in our family. So much so, I had to move mountains to even get my daughter a Christmas with her family, who she sees 2 - 3 times a week because of them. I moved mountains because they of course had to make it all about them and some drama that happened years ago, that they can’t let go of but can’t seem to tell a full story about either & actually confront the issue.

We had a graduation today that I did not go too because a) no invite & b) graduations are chaos and my child isn’t sitting in that. I get the rudest text from my sister and then she decides to use my dead grandparent against me and say I’m disgusting for leaving my mother (who told me a month ago she wanted nothing to do with me/husband/daughter) when my grandma was dead. I instantly blocked her because I knew she wanted me to go low like her but I’m so done with that. They use my grandma passing for every crutch and excuse but no one else can use it and it’s getting old. I loved my grandma dearly but you can’t lean on her death forever.

I honestly just needed to rant but also just hear that after this interaction (that I know involved my mother helping her create the text), how would you approach Mother’s Day (sending a text or no)? I refuse to let her ruin another day for me because last time I checked, I got a child cut out of my body, so Mother’s Day is also my day as well and I should be able to enjoy it how I see fit.

I am newly no contact (NC) with my mother for a little over a month. Her last message to me after basically apologizing for our argument (that she started) and begging for things to not be this way & keep her in my life (which i shouldn’t do!), was ‘have a nice one’.

So, I decided after 20+ years of verbal abuse, bottling up emotions in fear of judgement, modeling her narcissistic behavior, to take her at her word and not talk to her again. I got into therapy bc I am not turning into her and I realize now that all of it was not ok.

This upcoming Mother’s Day will be my first ‘holiday’ since doing all of this. She has seen me one time since this all happened and she made sure to talk to everyone in the room and emphasize her happiness to make me feel so invisible. I am a new parent and I realize that behavior is disgusting and I could simply never do that to my daughter.

Does anyone have advice on if I should even text her on that day? Do I reach out so she doesn’t use this against me and tell everyone how bad I am? I don’t know if this will ever be resolved to the point of communicating again, honestly. But, she’s been known to be spiteful enough to use the smallest things against people to berate them and I know this will be what she will do, but I don’t know how much i should care about this?

I am a 29F who has been NC with her mother as of one month. What set this NC off was some familial issues surrounding how my college aged sibling & cousin moved in together - long story short, they have an issue in the apt and my cousin wanted to move out & my sibling was going to as well but last minute changed her mind, got mad at my cousin for continuing to move & blocked my cousins, aunts, whole side of a family after that. Since then, it has been so tense at family gatherings and my mother took this and ran with bc she already disliked that side of the family anyway. Just another notch in her belt to talk about.

All of my daughters first holidays will be remembered as me stressing trying to work around my sibling not wanting to be near the family who has never done anything to me or my husband and daughter, drops everything if i need help, checks on us, acts like a normal family would??? I had to organize christmases and thanksgivings in order to ensure my daughter even had one but now i get to always think how i had to work around my mother and sibling.

At the beginning of April, I finally had enough of the constant comments about that side of the family, how bad they were, etc, and I flew off the handle on both my mom and sibling. The whole situation is so petty to even be angry over and cause a family divide but I grew up in fight or flight mode, always having to tip toe around her, you could feel the negative energy when you would get home from school, so in that moment I just felt 15 again & like I was getting yelled at for putting my laundry in the basket wrong. Growing up I was always made to feel like that side of the family didn’t like us because my cousins were favorites, my grandparents didn’t want us, didn’t love us. And once I told my grandparents this, all they could was cry and apologize but in reality, they were so unwelcome at our home growing up, they never had the chance to prove any of that wrong.

I have since apologized but they’ve made it clear they want nothing to do with me, even after I apologized several times & the last thing she said was ‘have a good one’. She seen me last week and made me feel so invisible and worthless, once again bringing me back to my childhood. I couldn’t imagine looking at my daughter and ignoring her, if anything, I would be looking internally wondering how i went so wrong for her to explode, but i have woken up to the lies I was fed and realized how I was treated was so verbally abusive.

I am in therapy & on medication because I realized I was living life like that, my husband hated coming home because it was just a dark cloud and I was snapping so easily over nothing. I refuse to become that. But, I would like to hear from people who have younger children, how do you do this? How do you (or will you) explain this to them?? What do I do about holiday, Mother’s Day coming up?