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[quote=Anonymous]OP here. Yes, it is a tricky situation, but the severity of my mother's problems make it feel like a no-brainer. As I have distanced our family from her (and she has done plenty of that herself as well) my other family members have cut us off.

My mother is a serious abuser. She has a grudge against my eldest, who at 3 didn't respond "respectfully" to her - and she is now 6. (My child is shy and had a shy moment) I have seen her throw her dogs against the wall, hard, when they don't "listen" to her. Luckily, growing up, we had no physical abuse, but very serious emotional and verbal abuse.

I have fought a very hard path out of the cloud I grew up in, and don't want to expose my children to those patterns. I don't want them to know what I have had to work so hard to break free of. Somehow I was blessed with a slightly stronger constitution than my sister. My sister is really messed up from it, completely cowed and defeated as a person, has trouble maintaining friendships, love relationships, jobs. She has horrible self-esteem / non-existent self worth, and can never manage to really advocate for herself. I don't like to hang out with her for long periods because that gets to me as well, hearing her stories of how she continues to let these patterns evolve into her life, even while she has a therapist.

I managed to fight through, not without scars, and not without some remnants. But I have a successful, demanding career, a great husband, and three incredible children. Financially we are stable but not what I would call successful. Master's degree in a technical field. Am I at the very top of my field, no. But I am talented and valued. We have a decent house and a hopefully bright future. My mother hates me for getting out, and for having this family life. She belittles me and find ways to sabotage relationships at any visit we do, with any person, so we keep a limit on it. We do short 30 minute visits twice a year max.

However, to up the ante, as she always will, my mother has manipulated her siblings to a point, and they have legitimately chosen of their own accord, to cut us out of their lives. There were one or two relationships where we were legitimately close and had what I thought was a healthy relationship. It made me so happy that my children had those relationships. However, in times of stress, I did see some unhealthy, abusive screaming and manipulative demands emerge with them, namely, that I wasn't dropping everything to be by my mother's side during a heart surgery (damage caused by painkillers, which destroy heart valves) literally giving notice at my job and spending three months with her, then, around Christmas, that I did not respond to a gift "fast enough" (4 days before Christmas, sorry! Busy time with three kids!) and finally, that I was not "respectful" enough by suggesting that we have a somewhat spontaneous visit with three days notice instead of a month. Those are their choices to be offended in those situations, and I believe they sort of masked the true issue, that they were convenient excuses for the fact that they were choosing my mother (out of pity which she still manages to elicit from them) over me and my young family.

This is a typical game of my mother's and one she plays with many people over the course of her sad life. My reaction has been, "well, if they do not want to be part of my children's childhood, that is their choice." It is hard for me that they will not acknowledge my mother's abusive behavior or multiple drug addictions. I just wonder how this plays out down the road. It pains me but as mentioned earlier, I do not feel that I actually have a choice here.

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