*I cannot wait to tell you the story behind this image. 😂🤭
Can you tell it’s AI generated? 🤭
So, I updated Ecency and, would you believe it, we can now use our Ecency points to generate images. Well. I burned through quite a few just playing around, and then the app very confidently suggested I use the title of my blog. Naturally, I obliged. 👀
Now I have questions. Many questions. Chief among them: why is there a rogue floating arm, and why does that smile belong to a man who looks like he knows entirely too much? 🫠
But anyway, back to business.
Yes, I have tolerated abusive behaviour, and no, this time I am not referring to AI, from someone close to me because of social pressure. In my case, that person was my mother.
If you have read my earlier blogs, then you already know that my grandmother raised me. She was the one who did the real work of mothering. She was the steady hand, the firm voice, the safe place. She raised me with love, discipline, and the kind of presence that does not need a speech to prove itself.
Still, life has a way of handing daughters impossible expectations. Somewhere along the line, many of us are taught that a mother must always be welcomed back, no matter what she has done. As if the title alone should erase the damage. As if biology is a magic wand. As if the child, now grown, must automatically become forgiveness in human form.
So when my mother came back into my life, I accepted her.
Not because she had earned that place, but because I felt I was supposed to. Because society can be very dramatic about mothers. People will tell you, with full confidence and absolutely no lived experience of your pain, that “she is still your mother,” as though that sentence is meant to fix everything. It rarely does. In my case, it did not.
What followed was not reconciliation. It was abuse. Physical. Emotional. Verbal. The kind that leaves bruises in places no one can see and words in your mind that do not leave when the room goes quiet.
And for a long time, I tolerated it.
I tolerated it because I did not want to be judged.
I tolerated it because people are often more comfortable with a woman enduring pain than they are with her setting boundaries.
I tolerated it because there is a particular kind of pressure placed on daughters to keep the peace, even if that peace costs them their own.
There is also the small matter of hope. Hope can be a beautiful thing, but in the wrong relationship, it can make a fool of you. You keep thinking this time will be different. This time she will soften. This time she will choose love over harm. And then one day you realise you have been giving chances to someone who has been giving wounds.
How did I handle it?
Not all at once. Not with one brave speech and a dramatic exit while the wind blew through my hair like a film scene. Life, sadly, is rarely that cinematic.
I handled it slowly. Quietly. By reaching the point where my peace became more important than other people’s opinions. By understanding that blood can explain a bond, but it does not excuse harm. By accepting that just because someone is your mother does not mean they are safe. And by finally giving myself permission to step away.
She is no longer in my life.
That is not cruelty. That is not bitterness. That is not me being hard or unforgiving. That is me choosing not to live with abuse just to make other people comfortable.
My grandmother raised me. My mother returned. And somewhere between those two truths, I had to decide what I would continue to allow.
I chose peace.
Not the fake kind that asks a woman to stay silent and smile nicely while her spirit breaks. Real peace. The kind that comes when you stop calling abuse by gentler names. The kind that begins when you understand that being a daughter does not mean being available for harm.
That took time.
But I got there.