We bought the house.

We're expecting our first child.

Our 11-year anniversary is this week.

I don't miss my narcissistic mother anymore.

I finally know what it feels like to be free.

And my children will never know what that prison was like.

I can't wait to meet you and love you eternally, unconditionally, and with everything in me. I will always do my best for you, but I hope you can forgive me when I make mistakes. I will protect you from my pain as best as I know how, but when it seeps through, I hope your soul will be so light that you don't notice it. It's still hard for me to navigate the world sometimes, and I will always be learning. God knows I'm so afraid to fail you.

JOURNAL: 2020 So Far

2020 is turning out to be yet another "take-the-bad-with-the-good" year.

I've grown into my work, and my boss has finally admitted his faith and confidence in me, as well as his gratefulness to God for having sent me his way. Unfortunately, COVID has ravaged the business. We're surviving, but it's stressful and everything is uncertain. I'm proud to say, though, that I've been a pretty essential part of keeping the things up and running, according to everyone except my boss. I've been told he doesn't like to dish out compliments because he doesn't want anyone getting a big head.

I'm seven months into no-contact with my mother. Her number is blocked in my phone, but she's texted me three times, and called me once. The first two texts were just her wanting me to get my stuff out of her house. The third text and one call I didn't pick up were about my dad. I had to find out from my great aunt that my dad has cancer. He's had surgery to remove the tumor, and he's doing radiation therapy. He was supposed to visit this summer. I wanted to have a meaningful conversation with him, and ask him some hard questions. Thanks to COVID and cancer, I can't do that, and I feel now more than ever that my time to do so is running out.

My husband and I are this close to buying our first house. The work commute is a pain in the butt, but we will be far enough away from my mother's family that we can breathe a sigh of relief. We decided that once we move, we would start trying for a baby. It was a swell plan until we realized that we're Rh-incompatible. My blood type is A- and his is supposedly A+. I've seen the consequences of Rh-incompatible births gone wrong. My sister-in-law needed eight pints of blood transfused after birth, and she was born deaf. It's a terrifying prospect to say the least.

My half-brother, the only sibling I like, has become a self-recruited flying monkey for our mother. The last time I went to see him where he works, he told me repeatedly that I "needed" to call her. Sometimes, it's hard for me to tell when he's being sarcastic, so when he told me he was going to take a picture of me and send it to our mother, I very firmly refused and walked out of his office. He followed me out, swearing up and down that he didn't actually know how to take pictures with his phone, but how could anyone possibly believe that? I think that's going to have to be the last time I see him.

It still baffles me to think that no one in my family has reached out to me since I left. Clearly, I don't "need" to speak with my mother, let alone any of her family. They seem perfectly happy live their lives without me. And that's wonderful, because it means they'll leave me alone. It means I'll be able to continue living a peaceful, productive life with my husband and the children we will hopefully have.

I have a healthy support system, now. I don't need my mother or her family, much less want them.

JOURNAL: December 2019

DECEMBER 3

This was the end. The final act. My mother's magnum opus of hatred.

The day before, my cousin broke and admitted that I was the person who told her what my mother and aunt had been saying about her. My mother confronted me, tried to get me to admit to it, but I never did. But she isn't the sort that can resist being vengeful. I'd seen it in the years of her threatening legal action over every tiny, inconsequential bad thing that happened to her. But this? This crossed into the realm of psychopathy.

I heard her on the phone saying she wanted to take one of my cats to be euthanized while I was at work.

After that, all bets were off. I decided I was done being meek. I decided my so-called family was not worth the life of my pet. It never should've have gone that far, but my sense of self-worth had been so thoroughly destroyed by her that it took her threatening something I loved to make me realize just how dire the situation was.

The next morning, I decided to begin cutting her off. I told my husband to cancel our Hulu TV package. We logged all the devices off our account and cancelled. I came home from the vet with the cat my mom secretly threatened to euthanize, newly microchipped, and my account at their office flagged if anyone tried to bring him in. Not long after, my mother sent me a text demanding the login credentials for Hulu. I simply told her we cancelled our service. She stormed through the house, slamming doors until she came up the stairs. She started berating me, calling me spiteful, saying she bet I thought it was funny to cancel without telling her. It kinda was, though. Taking something as stupid as TV from her sent her into unbridled rage. It's so pathetic, how could it not be funny?

But it stopped being funny pretty fast. She suddenly demanded I give her the keys to the gun safe. My husband and I kept our firearms in that safe, along with the pistol my mother wanted locked away so she couldn't get to it, and a few of my brother's guns. I went to the safe to open it, and began removing mine and my husband's weapons. She began screaming at me not to remove anything. I knew it was because she thought we had stolen my brother's guns.

I called my husband to help me identify his guns, but my mother was in my ear, screaming at me, screaming at my husband. I pulled out two ammo cans that belonged to us, and she tried to take them, so I yelled at her to get off. She was on the phone with my former-cop aunt, and said, "oh, did you hear that?! Did you hear her yell at me?!" As if I wasn't justified. My aunt then told her to call the police as though I was doing something illegal by removing things that belonged to me and my husband from a safe that we were about to lose access to. She had both keys, and was undoubtedly going to change the lock combination. Of course I needed to secure our firearms! She kept saying, "if you don't listen, I'm calling the cops!" I didn't listen, so she stormed away like she was going to do it.

Once everything of ours was out of the safe, I locked it all in our bedroom and went outside to wait for the police to show up. I called my dad, I called R, just to make sure they knew what was happening. I even had to call my boss and tell him that I didn't know whether or not I was going to jail that day. Well, the cops never came. But the fact that the thought even occurred to her to ENDANGER MY LIFE BY CALLING THE POLICE ABOUT US FIGHTING OVER GUNS, showed me how far gone she really was. She valued my brother's guns more than she valued my life.

I knew then that I never wanted anything to do with my "family" ever again. They feed into one another, and I can never know a healthy relationship with them.

And so began my life of no-contact.