Several months ago I went very limited contact with my mother. Now she wants to fix things but I’m happier without her in my life.

I have a lot of love and empathy for my mother. I think she is a very strong woman who has been dealt the short end of the stick a lot and done (what she thinks is) the best she could with the circumstances she’s had. Unfortunately, I’ve always been the person to suffer the consequences for the choices she’s made. She couldn’t afford to raise three kids on her own, so she stayed with the father who abused me. My brother had obvious mental health issues since he was young, so she put my needs aside in order to focus on his (imo she failed him too in this regard, but that’s another story). She was having a difficult time in her life with caring for her mother with Alzheimer’s and losing her social support system, so neglected my care when I was recovering from a brain injury and used me to vent all her frustrations. Those are just a few examples, and I can absolutely understand her actions, but it just always sucked to be me growing up. I am also the oldest of my siblings, and have some reason to believe she resents me for “sticking” her with my dad, so she has never been as warm or supportive to me as she is to my siblings, particularly my brother.

I moved out of her house three years ago when I got engaged, and soon afterwards a lot of family drama blew up and I started decreasing contact. My fiancé, who does not like my mother and believes she’s very manipulative, advocated for me to cut contact, but I didn’t want to mostly because of my sister who is 17 and still dependent on my mother. However, six months ago I decided to cut contact after a disastrous visit home that started with everyone “lovingly” making fun of me and taking cracks at my sexual orientation (I’m a lesbian) and ended with my drunk brother screaming at me to “get out of [his] life” and my mom defending him on the grounds that he just quit smoking. I decided I didn’t need that in my life and have had extremely limited contact with my mother since, and only as it pertains to my sister (she also has mental health issues and a budding drug problem so I’ve wanted to stay in the loop about that).

Now here’s my dilemma: when I told my mother how I would be reducing contact I stressed that it wouldn’t be forever, but I needed some time to heal and be away from her and I couldn’t do that while talking to her. She’s.... honestly varied in how much she’s respected that, but in the last few weeks she’s come to me multiple times offering to talk things out and saying she misses me and wants to be part of my life again. I haven’t yet answered her because I don’t know how. I do love her, and miss her, and I did tell her I wouldn’t cut her off forever, but honestly the longer we don’t talk the happier I am. Since cutting her out I’ve moved across the country, gotten a job I love, started seriously looking at going back to school (after feeling too stupid for school for years due to fights she and I would have), and am just generally happier and more confident than ever before in my life. I’m afraid that inviting her back in will open me up to sliding back into my old, less confident and happy self. I’ve also realized that there were a lot of ways in which she never treated me with respect that I didn’t catch before.

I’m considering telling her that we can talk occasionally only if she follows a set of ground rules, but I don’t know if that’s a good idea or really what those ground rules should be.

tl;dr went extremely limited contact with my mom six months ago, we miss each other but my life is better without her so I don’t know what to do.

Submitted March 28, 2019 at 12:26PM by Bluestargalactic https://ift.tt/2V41NFF