A different kind of International Women's Day post

This post contains a strong content warning for family violence.

Me with my first child in 2000

This International Women’s Day, I'm thinking about the women and assigned female at birth people who are alone, and lonely, because they are not allowed to see their children.

My Dutch cousin, who is much older than I am, had a very bad marriage breakup while her children were still in primary school.  Somehow her ex-husband convinced the court that she was an unfit mother and they ruled no contact.  My cousin was so bereft that she left the country and had another child that he could never take away from her. 

I felt very deeply sorry for my cousin.  At the time, I had never heard of such an unfair, one-sided, unhealthy outcome, nor had I heard the term ‘family violence’.  This situation was outside my ability to comprehend.

And so, when it happened to me, also as the result of a very bad marriage breakup and broader family violence, I felt that very deep sorrow again.  I am still feeling it.  It is not natural to be separated from your children, especially when the children are so wanted, and cared for, and cherished.

When my youngest son wrote to me to request the estrangement, it didn’t sound like his voice.  I even wondered if someone else had written the email for him.  However, this is common in family violence – grooming, gaslighting and conditioning can give a child a completely different personality. 

And so, it was both massively shocking, and the much-needed missing piece of the puzzle, when my mother confessed to me that she had been triangulating with my son against me, and had planted the idea in his head.  Sometimes, even the most hardened and practiced of narcissists are let down by their own protective shield of denial.

This is the mother who wouldn’t comfort me as a baby and left me in my iron cot to bang my head against the bars, over, and over, until a permanent scar formed.

This is the mother who withheld food as punishment when I was a young child.

This is the mother who controlled my eating as an adolescent to such an unhealthy extent, using guilt as her weapon, that developmental damage was almost certainly done.

This is the mother who financially, emotionally, physically, verbally, and psychologically abused me, over, and over, and over again, because I was powerless to do anything about it.  We can neither prove nor disprove that sexual abuse was also perpetrated.

This is the mother who called me an “arsehole” a year ago for parking in a disabled parking spot, and that I have allowed to abuse me into my middle age, because I am too empathetic and too forgiving.  My brain just can’t accept that a mother could be so cruel to their own child, and so I force myself to believe her story, that she is ‘just having a bad day’, and that it’s not her fault.  But my mother has not once, not ever, in five and a half decades, apologised for her behaviour.  Instead, it is always my fault.

I don’t talk to my mother anymore because there is nothing left to say. 

To all the survivor mums who’ve lost their kids to family violence, and who are alone, and lonely, because society and the law fail to understand its insidiousness and complexity – my Dutch cousin was sexually abused by her uncle, which made her statistically twice as likely to be abused as an adult in her intimate partner relationship – I wish you a very solemn International Women’s Day.

Gen Memory

March 2026