My (60F) Mom allowed me (32F) to be abused as a child at daycare and won’t acknowledge any of it. I’m considering ending our relationship.

It’s sort of a long story spanning over 8 years or so, but I’ll try to keep this as short as possible.

My mom has always been an incredibly hard worker. During most of my childhood she worked two different jobs as an RN. So I was often in the care of someone else. I can remember about as far back as 5 years old when we (my two brother and I) first started going to a new daycare in a new town, we will call the daycare lady “Shelly”. At first things seemed pretty awesome. Shelly would French braid my hair every day and offered popsicles freely. She would play barbies with me, and I soaked it all up as my mom was so absent that I had never really had a relationship like that with a grown woman. Shortly after starting daycare my mom and her new husband found out they were pregnant with my third brother. I was 6 when he was born. For some reason her pregnancy seems significant in the drastic change Shelly took on, but I’m not sure it has anything to do with it. I did notice right away how she treated the other children, but I thought she did it because they were bad kids. A normal day would be her pulling them around by their ears and forcing them to stand in a corner for hours at a time. When Shelly turned on me it wouldn’t take much to piss her off. One time I took my socks off and didn’t put them in my backpack, so she grabbed me by my hair and drug me across the floor to the corner where I stood there until my mom came to pick us up. One time I was eating a piece of watermelon and spit the seeds out onto the driveway. She forced me to stand in my bathing suit while she sprayed me with freezing cold water from a high pressure hose. Not too long after this incident we were removed from the daycare. I spoke to many professionals after this, they all questioned me about what had happened there and according to my aunt the daycare was shut down and Shelly spent some time in jail for child abuse.

My oldest brother was old enough to start watching us after we left Shelly’s. Things were pretty normal for about a year until he got too busy with after school stuff and sports. So we started going to a new daycare. We will call this lady “Wanda”. She didn’t even try to play nice with us. She was cold and mean from the very beginning. I enjoyed going to school because it was 7 hours a day I didn’t have to spend at Wanda’s. Summers were the worse, Wanda would make us spend the entire summer (no matter how hot) outside with no water until our parents came to collect us. She would stay inside watching her soaps all day while stuffing her face and if we needed to use the bathroom we would have to knock on the front door and wait until a commercial break. If we got in trouble we would have to sit on her front steps with no shade for a few days at a time so we could “think about what we did wrong”. Winters were rough too, as it meant we were inside more to make her angry and punishments would be severe. We had the same thing for lunch nearly every day (a very small bowl of rice mixed with cream of chicken soup, I’m talking maybe a cup), sometimes just plain macaroni. The only time I ever had anything other than the rice or some other bland mushy food was when I was recovering from tonsil removal surgery when I was 8 and she forced me to eat crunchy foods despite me crying and telling her how much it hurt my throat. One time I got so upset I threw the food up (there was blood in it), which resulted in an extended spanking (she spanked us often and left marks). If Wanda caught you in a lie she would make you stick your tongue out and then smack the bottom of your chin so you would bite your own tongue. I remember one little boy bleeding a ton and it just pissed her off more. I had precocious puberty and started my period when I was 9ish, she told me I couldn’t take my purse to school which left me in a really embarrassing situation. My baby brother would cry while my mom was walking us into her home and spent a good deal crying throughout the day. I was always very hungry and thirsty. I begged my mom to send us somewhere else but her excuse was that this babysitter was cheap and she couldn’t afford anything better.

I never got to have the childhood I should have had. I spent most of it in fear, and doing whatever I could to not upset Wanda. The summer vacation other children looked forward to felt like impending doom to me. I resent my mom for not being my advocate and allowing this to happen to me. I don’t seem to have the ability to form healthy relationships because of this. I ended up in an emotionally abusive relationship with a man for 8 years and couldn’t even see what was happening until one night he got physically violent and the police were called, I left and never looked back. We have been broken up for a few years now, and I am of the mindset that I won’t ever be able to have a healthy relationship with anyone, ever.

I have brought up Shelly and Wanda now as an adult to my Mom and she tells me that it wasn’t like what I remember at all. Sometimes she will do a nervous giggle and change the subject. I quit trying to bring this up to her, she clearly has no plan to tell me why or even apologize. Lately this has really been weighing on me. I’ve been in therapy for two years now and my therapist seems to think my eating disorder (anorexia) stems from the abuse I received as a child. My therapist is awesome and she’s the only person I truly trust. She wants me to focus on the forgiveness aspect of it all, and try to move on so I don’t have all these barriers around me. I just can’t.

I’m beginning to think I need to just cut my mom out of my life. Sometimes I’m so filled with anger I can’t even look at her. When I’m around my mom all of those memories come flooding back and I want to scream at her for not doing something. I can’t help but feel that if she apologized I would come to some sort of peace with it all and just move on with my life.

This hasn’t completely stunted me. I have a successful career, and I’m still continuing my education. I consider myself friendly and kind and even make “friends”with others but there is always this feeling that I shouldn’t let anyone in. If anyone gets too close I’ll start to ghost. I hate that I am this way, but I’m afraid of what it will mean if another person hurts me.

Reddit, where the hell do I even begin in terms of healing myself and maybe having a future relationship with my mother? Am I a garbage human for just cutting her out of my life after all these years have passed? My brothers remember these things too but they don’t seem to be as effected by them. Am I over reacting? I need help.

Thank you for taking the time to read this, any advice or suggestions is appreciated.

TLDR; My Mom knew I was being abused as a child and did nothing to stop it. I’m thinking about cutting her out of my life in hopes it might help me move on and heal.

Submitted May 03, 2019 at 07:13AM by Neptrthepierobot http://bit.ly/2IW19aR