Thank you both so so much for taking the time to reply to me and for your wise advice. I will definitely take on board your suggestions. I especially like your suggestion, Roberta, of if we were to meet, an outside space like a park could be helpful. I think I always just suggested that we would call to hers, so I could get up and leave whenever I wanted and not have to wait around for a meal / coffee to finish. She definitely does suffer from memory loss, I think each mental episode she has had has damaged her sense of being tuned in to the real world. The friends and acquaintances she has now, she has mainly met through mental health services. These people are (understandably) on her side and encourage her to reach out to me so she can see me and her grandchild. However they are absolutely unaware of the horrendous trauma her children suffered. They just see her as a woman who’s daughter doesn’t make much of an effort with her. This also affects me as I’ve even had a friend of hers reach out to me to tell me about how often she sees her own grandchildren and that my mother loves my daughter and wants to see her more often. This frustrates me (and I guess this is definitely a personal issue that probably stems from childhood, where I get annoyed that her people think I’m the one in the wrong)

Tee, I’m sorry you had to deal with similar issues with your own mother. As a mother myself I cannot in a billion years fathom how a woman could cause their own child to suffer. It physically hurts to think of my own daughter going through even a fraction of that pain. I have gone to therapy a number of times in the past, most recently it finished due to covid restrictions in 2020. I do agree that perhaps I need to learn how to deal with the way I react, rather than expect her to suddenly have a lightbulb moment (or to get OJ from a cow!) as this is realistically never going to happen. Recently I feel like I am almost mourning the nurturing mother I never had, and so resentful of the one I do have.

Even writing my feelings in this post is awakening a lot – so I think writing a letter is a good start. I actually did this before and although she acknowledged it at the time, it didn’t really change anything in the long run. But circumstances are different now and I guess there’s no harm writing another one. It’s just hard to know what I should suggest – that we don’t see each other at all? That we only see each other when I feel strong enough? I don’t really know where to draw the line. I forgot to say she lives quite close to me – less than 10 min drive. So I can’t use distance as a reason.