Working out a non-response aloud

[claudiaduffy]

My husband and I have been strictly and completely NC with his mother for eighteen months (I mean, WE haven't contacted her. She tries to send us all kinds of things - emails, packages, second-hand messages through other people.) I'm gradually losing my fear of her unwanted intrusion, attacks, manipulation, etc. and am working on letting reminders of her roll off my back like water on a duck. We have our email set where everything from her goes to the trash folder and eventually auto-deletes (unfortunately, our email doesn't have an actual blocking capability), and I often have this sense that stuff from her is just lurking evilly in my trash folder. I hide myself from it.

But today I faced it, and went and took her latest message and wrote a response. Not to be sent, but to interact calmly with my own fears and irritations, and speak truth to myself about the healing that my husband and I are working on, and why it is important that we continue to do so. [I've changed the names.]

------

Please be happy, honey.  All will be well.  I'm doing much, much better.  I sometimes still grieve, but not so much that I feel like my life ended with Frank's passing.  I dearly love Bart [new husband], and I know he will love you and Tom [my husband].  God truly is good all the time.  I need your prayers, Claudia.  I hurt you cruelly, and I am so very sorry.  :)uring that time just after you and Tom were married, the numbness that I felt for several weeks after Frankie died started to wear off, and panic, fear, anger, depression struck me hard.  Claudia, I desperately needed you and Tom --- my kids --- but understandably y'all were in the bliss of honeymooning and setting up housekeeping.  (Isn't Tom just amazing?  I raised him right, to be a good and caring husband someday, and he had a wonderful dad.)  I believed that I could handle living alone, but my grief was too raw and new.  Fifty-one years is a long time.  Our children couldn't understand that we literally had grown up together and our love never failed, even through the hardest times.  Frank was my life, my very life.  I loved that man so, so much.  I still miss him, his special gentleness that was for me alone.  I miss all the little special things we held dear, the tiny secret smiles that were just for each other, his hand on mine in the night, protective, comfortable; the funny little way that long-married couples tend to murmur last thing at night their concerns and dreams for the children, and I miss going to sleep on my sweetheart's shoulder.

I wish you well. Completely well. Wholly well. You have my prayers. Your son has actually healed enough to pray for you, too. And I really do know that all will be well. We are entrusting you to God's care and his alone. Where we have handled our relationship with you wrongly, we trust that he will set us straight. We are hoping to see you in the eternity where this brokenness in you - and all brokenness in all of us - will actually be healed in a way it never can before that time.

You did hurt me, but mainly in that you showed yourself repeatedly, ceaseless, relentlessly unable to keep from consuming your son and raging out of control when he did not do as you wished. This was mostly before Frank died. It was not a result of your grief.

Do you miss mocking Frank in front of dinner guests? Of making derogatory insinuations in front of your son and his fiancee about your husband's sexual appetite? Do you miss having him there for you to physically slap? Are you forgetting that you routinely ran to and clung to your son instead of your husband when your emotions flared in any direction?

I am not your honey. We are not "kids." Your children understand far more than you realize. Do you remember that you have two adopted daughters, one of whom you had institutionalized as a teen, the other of which will also not speak to you because of your physical and emotional abuse inflicted on her?

I want to talk to you one day about my Frank, because women understand other women, and I am praying that once the flood waters of hurt feelings and acute grief have abated, we will love to spend time together.  I want you to be my very dear and trusted friend, loved one, and kindred spirit.  In a perfect world, these would have developed smoothly.  As our family heals, as perspective brings compassion to us both, as Tom remembers his gentle Lady Mother and forgives her for falling off her pedestal, you and I will have a chance, honey-girl.  I thank God that he has you to help him and to hold him.  Tommy keeps things in, and he sometimes just needs to break down and cry, but that is hard for him.  I have never seen him so happy in his whole life... .and he had an idyllic childhood... .as he was on the day he married his soulmate!  His face was a study in pure joy!  A man's joy!  Not a young boy's delight --- A man's joy and delight in finding the one person in all the world who would complete him.  If Tom and I were having these troubles and he did not have you, I would be deeply worried, Claudia.  Thank you, thank you, thank you for loving this precious son the way you do.

You talked to me about Frank while he lay iced down in a coma in the hospital. When I asked you to talk about him and how you came to love each other, most of your story was about the women you edged out in order to get him, and your triumphs in that courtship. It was strange and, had we not been sitting next to your dying husband, I would have questioned you on this.

You are *not* a "gentle Lady Mother." Gentle does not break her own ribs trying to break down her grown son's bedroom door in the home that he owns, just because she cannot bear that he has even a bedroom door separating him from her when she wants to keep him up at night comforting her. A lady does not launch email and phone call campaigns against her daughter-in-law with the claims that she is from a cult that has brainwashed her son, nor does she make violent and public threats against a pastor and his family because he supported her son's marriage and path to healing. A mother does not disown her two adopted daughters because they don't behave the way she wants and she finally has a biological son to raise to fill in for his father's perceived failings.

Women do not necessarily understand other women. And we are not in acute grief. Your son has cried. He has actively and with pastoral help worked on processing his grief - over his father, and over you. He has more processing to do still, and so do I.

I did not complete your son. He is a complete man in his own right. I fight for him, I support him, and we have found in each other a better friend than either of us have ever known. I, too, am glad I am here for him.

You cannot, by continuing to call him "Tommy", keep him as the suckling babe you wanted to hold onto for life. Since you will not stop, we are stopping listening to you. I am not going to read another word you send. You may not terrorize us, attempt to FOG us, or try to tempt us with gifts. We have thrown away, unopened, everything you have sent. We will not live at this address for much longer, and you cannot follow us away from here.


Well, this is getting long, and I'm getting tired.  Y'all will want to know that Fido went to vet clinic today and turns out he is doing much better!  He plays every day with a huge fenced bsckyard to run in, and although I know he misses his bro, "Papa Bart" and he have a pleasant bond.  Bart never has had pets indoors before, but he's come to love Fido and Kitty.  And, Kitty has GROWN!  She's a big, beautiful kitty now who spends lots of time stretched out on Bart's lap.

Did you know that your son has significant pet allergies that he did not realize he had, since you have always had pets in the home? And that, after having umpteen respiratory and digestive illnesses during our dating and engagement year when you and the pets lived with him, he has had *zero* illnesses in a year and a half of living without you in a pet-free apartment?

As for me, I0in the abiding love of a fine Christian husband, a fine man who makes me laugh, sings silly songs with me, prays and studies the Bible with me, and tells me  lovely stories when I'm sick.

I wish my beloved, beautiful,  :)IL many happy days.

For your sake, I hope you can stay in this frame of mind. You seem happier than when you're raging. I will not send you a response to this message, because you are yet again disregarding your son's instructions that you not contact me - and because I have no desire to interact with you. You are bigger than me, and in one way you are stronger than me; you are not held back by fear of hurting me. You have no restraint except when it's a tactic you're trying out to see if it works for you this time.

If being your beloved were the only picture of what love is, I would run from the very word. But I know it to be so much greater that I am truly praying for love to be real for you. Love that will burn away all that is twisted and wrong and evil. I hope there is something left under all that in you, something that can finally grow and heal. I hope for your sake that this begins to happen soon.

Much love,

Mama Isabelle

You are not my mama.

I will leave you with an old Rabbinic blessing.

"May God bless and keep the Tsar... .far away from us!"

[Kwamina]

Hi claudiaduffy!

So how does it make you feel to have responded to her e-mail? (without really sending it of course but still)

When you talk about the sense of stuff from her lurking in your trash folder, that really struck a cord with me. I think if I were you I'd have the same feeling because although it went directly to the trash, you still know or suspect it's there. In general it probably still is best to just not read her e-mails but perhaps it was good to do it this one time to overcome that sense of 'something lurking in the trash'. Sometimes in our minds such things can assume enormous proportions, but now that you've addressed this mail you know that no matter how unpleasant it was, you are able to handle it. So does the trash folder now seem a little less intimidating to you?  I certainly hope it does!

[claudiaduffy]

It does feel less scary! I also went through and deleted most of the stuff that she ever sent me; kept a few permanent archived things that we may need in case of legal accusations, but the rest of it went in the trash. I also figured out a problem that I had with conflicting filters that had kept certain emails from getting auto-deleted; it shouldn't be a problem in the future.

Her email that I quoted above was titled "Goodnight" and I am laughingly titling my day's response "Good-bye." I feel freer and lighter. It had been like a closet that just needed to be cleaned out. I intend to keep my word to myself and not read anything else that ever leaks through. I may even go ahead and change my email address at some point; I had stubbornly refused to before because I hated to feel that she was chasing me away from what was rightfully mine. I think if I make that choice now, it will be because I *want* to make that change, not because I am afraid or driven to it.

[Kwamina]

It does feel less scary!

... .

I also figured out a problem that I had with conflicting filters that had kept certain emails from getting auto-deleted; it shouldn't be a problem in the future.

Great to hear that! And also that there was this added bonus of detecting the conflicting filters

I may even go ahead and change my email address at some point; I had stubbornly refused to before because I hated to feel that she was chasing me away from what was rightfully mine. I think if I make that choice now, it will be because I *want* to make that change, not because I am afraid or driven to it.

This sounds like progress to me! Doing something because you want to instead of feeling 'forced' to. Writing this response to her e-mail seems to have allowed you to do some internal work and empower yourself

[claudiaduffy]

This sounds like progress to me! Doing something because you want to instead of feeling 'forced' to. Writing this response to her e-mail seems to have allowed you to do some internal work and empower yourself

Ha, I hope so!

I've had occasional bad dreams about my own uBPDmom ever since I left home 16 years ago; they tend to flare up when I'm either stressed (which makes sense) OR when I'm in a really good emotional place (like my subconscious thinks it's a good safe time to process stuff). They took a backseat to bad dreams about uBPDmil over the last two years. However, I hadn't had any for a long stretch, and then a week or two ago I had a bad dream about my dad. Which has literally never happened before, even though I've spent some time in past years working on healing in how I feel towards him and his apparent inability or refusal to adequately protect his children against his wife. I woke up not afraid, not really even upset, but sort of congratulating myself - that apparently my subconscious thinks I'm healed enough past the mom and mom-in-law to start exorcising bad feelings about dad now! Yay, self. =)

[Kwamina]

I try to look at some of my dreams like this too. Sometimes like you say that perhaps now I've healed enough from certain things that I can move on to others. At other times I also feel like I have been repressing certain things or have been unwilling to address them. But as hard as I might try to not acknowledge them, they then still surface through my dreams. And keep resurfacing until I finally decide to address them in my 'waking life'. Like the occasional dream I have about my brother who I've been NC with for 5 years now.

[K1313]

Thank you for posting this. My husband struggles mightily with my BPDmother and seeing this written from the POV of a child-in-law was really useful.

I wish you luck in your dealings with your MIL and every joy in your life with your husband.

[Panda39]

claudiaduffy,

I think you had a great idea responding to the email... .getting your feelings out and having your say.  Then you have the added bonus of posting it here and getting your feelings validated in a way your MIL is incapable of.  I think it's a win/win. 

Kudos to you and your husband for taking care of yourselves. 

[claudiaduffy]

Thanks, K1313 and Panda.  Looking back, it's really nice to realize that dealing with my MIL has gone from feeling like hiding in a crack in the ground as a dragon claws and breathes fire at me, to merely shooing away a pesky horsefly.