Blame and Shame

I never thought I would ever be ashamed of my daughter. I've seldom been more wrong than I was about this. I've never been more ashamed of anything in my entire life than I currently am of her. What's the cause, aside from the blatant disrespect of her calling me a whore on social media? She convicted me and handed down a mandatory sentence without even listening to my side of the story.

Her father's ex-wife stole my erotic/pornographic fiction, cherry-picking from it to frame me for the failure of her marriage, and presented it to my daughter as fact, convincing my daughter that her father never loved me and that we used her recovery to have an affair presented as base sexuality without love. In actuality, we fell back in love with each other while we were saving our daughter’s life.

The truth is that he refused to meet her demands, chose divorce over her lies. This was her ultimatum: call me (on speakerphone, for her listening pleasure) and tell me that he never loved me (we were first love, btw, back in 1988, didn’t break up but both of us caught severe mononucleosis and nearly died) and (get this) that our daughter was a mistake that he (present tense) regrets. He refused because none of that is true. Shannon was bound and determined to get someone to say it, so she got my daughter to say it.

Never mind the fact that my daughter was six months out of rehab when Shannon blatantly sexualized her parents to her, which is traumatic for anyone, at any time. Six months out of rehab. My daughter is drinking again, and she's a psychologically abusive drunk hell-bent on breaking me. I've had to block her, and I don't think I can ever have a private conversation with her again due to her egregious abuse of privacy with me. She's also banned me from my grandson's daycare and severed my relationship with him. She hates me more than she loves her son. I don't have words to express how ashamed I am of this.

I didn't raise my daughter to speak to anyone the way she's spoken to me; it's so bad that a message from her makes my body feel like it's being attacked: my heart rate and blood pressure spike, adrenaline pumps through my system and puts me in fight or flight. It's excruciating. And then there are the fits of rage, when I want to break everything I can get my hands on, scream at the top of my lungs how much I hate them both, my daughter and her lying, victim-playing ex-stepmother (someone here reminds of her--playing victim and rhetorically framing me as a villain to gain sympathy)

My relationship with my grandson has not been a casual one, and having it torn out of my life has hurt me worse than anything I've ever experienced. It's compounded by knowing that this hurts him more than it hurts me. The sweetest little boy in the world has lost his grandmother and has to lie in bed, terrified when his mother goes on one of her drunken rants. She's done all of this to appease a woman-child who encouraged her to deny her own existence and cut her ties with both of her parents. This woman-child didn't want her (now ex) husband to contribute financially to his daughter's treatment in rehab because she wanted that money to be spent on another pure-bred dog, the barren equivalent of having a baby to fix a failing marriage. She's always hated me because I had her husband's child a decade before she met him and could never get past the fact that I am my daughter's mother. She was an absent, negligent stepmother, and she's now become a psychologically abusive ex who sees what she's done to my daughter as collateral damage in getting revenge on me. The statute of limitations allows me six more years to legally pursue her theft of my electronic documents, and damages have already piled up.

I don't know if I will be able to forgive my daughter for how deliberately hurtful and horrible she's being. At this point, I doubt I can forgive the other family members who have abandoned and alienated me at her bidding while I house their pets. However, you don’t even have to ask them—they’ll tell you what fine Christians they are. I've never been more ashamed in my life.