I fell in love with my husband before I even knew his history. It sounds naive and even fictitious but it is true. I didn’t know where he came from or how many siblings he had. I knew how charming, honest, decent, strong, passionate, and just real he was in the first three days of meeting him. He took me by complete surprise and on the third day when he finally kissed me for the first time I was done.
I won’t sugar coat this, I have never had a relationship with the woman that is biologically my mother in law. Over the years I tried more than a few times to build a relationship but she was never interested any more than I was honestly. It doesn’t make me proud in any way that I couldn’t be a better person, I prayed and prayed for years about it. She never did anything blatantly mean or rude to me but I just could not see anything except a woman who hurt her child. After the man I loved told me about how he was abused, physically and emotionally, by his mother; how he had no happy or positive memories of her; how his first memories ever are of hiding from her I couldn’t see anything except a person who made a child feel things they never should. There are people in her family that still love and adore her, and people at her church that see her as a good woman, but all I ever saw was someone who hurt him and got away with it. After our first child was born my husband decided then that it was not healthy for him or our family to have her in our lives and we haven’t spoken to her or heard from her since. Maybe I am a worse Christian for it but even now the thought of her makes me angry and hurt.
Loving a survivor of Child Abuse is just like loving anyone else except that they have had someone in their life, usually someone very close to them, hurt them. They have been wounded in ways most of us cannot ever understand at a time in their life in which they were already vulnerable so they understandably are hesitant and often have walls to protect themselves. It took years for my husband to really understand and accept how much I loved him and the unabated way in which I loved him. As mothers most of us cannot imagine someone hurting our children but the reality is that it happens every day and that all of us will come into contact with those who are being or have been abused in our lives. I have spent much of my adult life working with children in different ways and I have seen children of various types of abuse. I have sat next to children as they were being interrogated by a Law Enforcement Officer and filled out CPS reports. I have never in any case seen a child who in any way “deserved” it or a parent who had a justifiable reason or excuse. But what happens to those children? They grow up and sometimes repeat the same cycle in their families and our society. My husband grew up and he was truly able to grow from his experiences. He is strong because he had to be, and honest because he sees the necessity for it. He also is extremely controlled at all times because he understands better than most why that is so important and powerful. He is a survivor but not a victim and not a person who ever allowed what happened to define him.
I too am a wife of a survivor.
My husband has not talked to his mother us over 7 years. If someone continues to hurt you and you stick around, it’s not healthy. He severed his communication with her, not only for himself, but for us as well.
I always wondered how someone who knew no love could learn to love. The answer is simple. Those who know God know love.
1 John 4:7-12
Dear friends, let us love one another, because love is from God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. The one who does not love does not know God, because God is love. God’s love was revealed among us in this way: God sent His One and Only Son into the world so that we might live through Him. Love consists in this: not that we loved God, but that He loved us and sent His Son to be the propitiation for our sins. Dear friends, if God loved us in this way, we also must love one another. No one has ever seen God. If we love one another, God remains in us and His love is perfected in us.
My precious husband is also a survivor of horrific child abuse. I have never met his mother and he ignores her constant emails and voice mails. His stories of the abuse are deeply disturbing and make me feel physically ill. No one ever knew about the abuse and I hate knowing that woman now lives a happy, normal life while my husband takes fistfulls of psychotropics and lives in therapy. I desperately want justice for what she did to him, but there is an absolutely ridiculous statute of limitations for child abuse.
I am the child abuse survivor married to the loving spouse. It’s funny you mentioned church, because part of my Google search was about being a Christian and still having a relationship with the abusive parent. The loving parent has been deceased for a long time, and so all I have left is my mother. Has she been capable of loving deeds? Yes, and she has also been capable of unimaginable cruelty I just assumed as a child was going on in everyone else’s home when no one was looking, as she saved her abuse for behind closed doors (except once — she lost her head in front of my friend who reported her to her own mother, but the report went nowhere.) My brother has had no relationship with her for decades and lives thousands of miles away. He has no relationship with me as well, because years ago I foolishly sided with her as she pleaded the “honor your mother and father” and “bring my prodigal son” back home Scriptures within only a context that suits her narrative, like anything else she says. Once I got very close to hearing her admit, unprompted, the devastating, scarring abuse she heaped upon me as a child — only for her to end that statement with, “but … (enter blaming her own terrible childhood on all of her actions, so therefore I can’t hold her responsible garbage.)” I tried several times to cut ties, but something bad happens to me each time — a stroke of bad luck, etc., — and I see it as God’s punishment for “dishonoring” my mother — the same woman who told me pointblank that she didn’t have to respect me, because I was her child. I have no idea how to proceed from here. She’s always had me entrenched, always made me feel completely indebted to her (for such convoluted, disgustingly shocking reasons that I won’t go into here) … other survivors of violence get to part ways with no (or very few) guilt feelings at all, whereas folks like me feel doomed to forever serve our abuser at the expense of everything good in our lives. Like that’s all we are here for … Thanks for loving the survivor of abuse. You may never be able to fully convince us we are worth it, but it means more than we can ever say.
You do not need to remain in any way connected to her. Please step away. The guilt is misplaced. Being a Christian does not mean you are in any way indebted to her, and authentic forgiveness means allowing your anger and grief over how she treated you to be expressed and fully felt. Forgiveness also does not mean that you need to have a relationship with her. I’m a Christian who is no-contact with an abusive relative (who abused my spouse and others) and I know the pressure to forgive and tolerate the abuser. Step away and find people who can support you. Blessings.