Dear moonlight:

This will be a long post, I hope that you have the patience to read through it, if not in one sitting than in a few, at your convenience. I first read from you when you posted on another member’s thread in August 10 this year, over 2 months ago. I did not forget what you shared there.  I wrote to you Aug 11: “I admire you for turning away from your mother (ending contact with her)  so to be a better mother to your child!..  If you would like to have me/ other members interact with you, please start your own thread..”- I am glad that you started your own thread Oct 18.

You shared back in August that it’s been 3 months since you went no contact with that woman. Before I proceed, I need to refer to that woman not as a Mother, but as a Monster (another M word). You stopped contact with the monster in May 2021. And if you didn’t renew contact with her since yesterday, it is now five months of  no contact.

Back in August, you wrote: “I want to live an honest life and be true to my words. No hypocrisy is allowed under any circumstances“- Fast forward to today, I can see why honesty, truth and integrity are very strong values in your mind, heart and life: “One time when I was 6 years old  she made me rehearse a line…  She would ask me, in front of him ‘When your daddy dies would you cry?’ and I was supposed to respond ‘No, of course not I won’t cry because you’re not my real daddy.’ So when the time came I said exactly what she told me to say and he was offended but did not respond.  My mother then  said to me ‘you dumb child why would you say such a horrible thing like that, you will hurt his feelings’ and she laughed at me”-

-you followed her instructions, being the good daughter that you were, but she did not reward you for your obedience and loyalty, she punished you instead, laughed at you and insulting you. She betrayed you. You know how much it hurts when this happens and you don’t want your son to feel this kind of hurt: “I want to raise the baby as an honest person. I don’t want the child to grow up and end up resenting me because I was not true to my words. I would never want my child to experience the physical, emotional and verbal abuse that I went through. I want to protect my child from evil, and pain” (Aug 2021).

I want to compare your reaction to the monster with your half sister’s reaction to the same monster: notice in the quote right above, you wrote that you don’t want your child to end up resenting you, resentment means long-term anger. Your reaction to the monster’s betrayal included long-term anger. This is what you wrote about your sister back in August: “She doesnt want to be a mother out of the fear of hurting our evil mom“- her reaction to the monster is to see the monster as a good person, and therefore, her dominant emotion toward the monster is not not anger but Empathy: she doesn’t want the monster to feel hurt.

For you, the monster is “evil”. In your sister’s mind.. the monster is good. (She probably doesn’t think this way all of the time, she may had made references that her mother is bad.. but these moments of sanity are fleeting and superficial, and dominantly, she is deluded, is my best understanding).

“At the beginning of my pregnancy I decided to cut my mother out of my life. As a result my sister has stopped talking to me. I told her why I had to cut our mother out of my life but she gave me an ultimatum, either I maintain a relationship with our mother or she will no longer keep in touch with me… I want to tell my sister that she is living a lie and that she doesn’t actually know who her real father is… I can’t get past this feeling bad that she doesn’t care about me at all. I feel like she hates me for no reason, I’ve never done anything to hurt her so why is she treating me like this? It doesn’t make sense”-

“I want to tell my sister that she is living a lie and that she doesn’t actually know who her real father is“- who her biological father is, that’s a minor lie. The big lie in your sister’s mind, heart and life is that the monster is a good person.

“I’ve never done anything to hurt her“- But the monster is telling your sister that you did something to hurt her: ending contact with her. For your sister, the monster is good and whomever is hurting the monster is bad.

“she hates me for no reason“- her reason is that you are hurting the monster by not having contact with the monster (the monster told her so, and she believes the monster).

“why is she treating me like this? It doesn’t make sense“- in your sister’s mind, the monster is good and you are.. the monster. It’s nothing personal, really. She would probably hate anyone who’d hurt the monster (stated more accurately: she would hate anyone the monster claims to be hurt by).

“I almost want to contact my evil mother again just so my sister will talk to me but I know my evil mom will just hurt me if I do call her“- You value Truth. Truth is: the monster is a monster. Your sister is deluded, thinking the monster is good. If you contact the monster so to please your sister, you will be supporting your sister’s delusion/ untruth. In doing so, you will be encouraging your sister’s untruth to last and last. If you persist in no contact, maybe.. just a small maybe, your sister might change her understanding.

“How do I move on from this?“- resist your desire to talk to your sister. Stay away from her and if she reaches out to you with a bit of a willingness to see the monster for whom the monster is, then by all means, help her further to see what is true.

“if I tell the child you must not allow yourself to be in a relationship with someone who treats you this way, then I myself must live by this rule… So if I continue to be friends with my evil mother, my child will learn by example and I am setting him/her up for a lifetime of being in abusive relationships“- this is your integrity and it is you being a good mother. Please do not make it possible for your sister to (1) take your integrity away. (2) take a good mother away from your son, replacing a good mother with a.. (however conflicted) partner of a monstrosity.

Talking about monstrosity: “I was three years old. She was shoving mangoes into my mouth..  6 mangoes until I threw up. This was my punishment for asking a stranger  for a piece of their mango…Torture sessions and beating sessions occurred regularly… She filled my backpack with heavy cans of soup and made me kneel on a pile of tiny sharp pebbles.. My knees started bleeding. She said that if I told anyone what happened no one would believe me.. Sometimes when the pebbles would pierce my knees too soon, she would have me kneel on steel grates to have a more prolonged session… she would have my lie on my stomach on the floor.. whack me until the skin on my bum came off and was bleeding. When i cried due to the pain, she told me to shut up or she would whack me some more until I was quiet.. She chased me with a cleaver.. she began chasing me as soon as I got out of the bramble bush I ran up a wooden staircase to the neighbor upstairs and banged on their door. someone answered as she reached me at the top, with the cleaver in her hand. The neighbor asked me what was wrong and my mother said “oh, nothing..”-

“She said that if I told anyone what happened no one would believe me“- if you renew contact with the monster.. your sister will not believe you, fast forward: your son will not believe you, thinking something like: my mom wouldn’t allow contact with a bad person.. therefore grandmother must not be bad.

“I ran up a wooden staircase to the neighbor upstairs and banged on their door“- you are now figuratively inside that “neighbors upstairs” apartment, safe from the monster. Figuratively, the monster is sending your sister to bang on your door, carrying the monster’s cleaver. Please do not open your door to the monster’s agent, or to the monster herself.

“The neighbor asked me what was wrong and my mother said “oh, nothing“- the monstrosity you suffered is not Nothing. It is a huge Something. It is something that you will suffer from, to  one extent or another, for the duration of your life. Protect yourself and your son and your husband from more monstrosity.

The monster said: “oh, nothing”. Your sister says: oh, nothing. Don’t join them with: oh, it was nothing, it is nothing.. I was just imagining Something.

“She told me I was never allowed to have a child, she threatened to get me ‘sewed’  up so I would never have a baby“- the monster hates children, doesn’t she. I imagine that she is thinking that unlike her,  you will be a good mother to your child, and that enrages her. She doesn’t want to see a safe, happy child. She wants all children to suffer like she suffered when she was a child. If you let her have contact with your son.. she will want to make him suffer too. She will find a way, or ways to accomplish that.

“My favorite philosopher is Alan Watts, I listen to his lectures when I feel depressed. I highly recommend” (Aug 2021). A quote from Alan Watts: “Muddy water is best cleared by leaving it alone“- leave the monster and her agent alone. If the agent reaches out to you with some desire to leave the muddy water alone, then help her. Don’t go back to the muddy water- all that you will accomplish if you do- is to get more and more mud on yourself and on the child you want to protect.

anita