Please forgive the wall of text, but I have to get this off my chest somehow.

After just about a half century on this planet the time has come for me to make the horrible decision to finally cut my mum out of my life for the sake of my mental health.

Back when I was a baby my mom and dad had a horrible divorce, I have never actually met my father and he has never paid child support even though he lives in the same city. Mom moved in with her parents and looking back those years of my life were the most stable and happiest.

My mother has always had anger issues and anxiety, she wouldn't let me take a bath on my own and once when I was 6 she smacked me in the back of the head while I was in the tub so hard I chipped my front tooth, I look at the dentist's work everyday in the mirror.

She moved in with what was to be my stepfather when I was 9 and it soon became apparent that he was an abusive alcoholic who had also left his first wife and daughter. Things were rocky from the start, one night the neighbours found him drunk in the ravine behind the house and dragged him in. We had totally different personality types, he was a hard drinking working man while I was a quiet and nerdy kid who loved to read. He beat me and mentally abused me often, once he smacked me till I blacked out, another time he hit me when I got a math problem wrong and got a bloody nose and ran screaming to my room. I remember shivering under the sheets while they fought till 2am. This was in the 80's so I think abuse was considered family business and no one called the authorities even though I was in school covered in bruises. When he finally got pulled over driving on the shoulder of the highway at 15km an hour blind drunk he was sent to jail for six months and finally that summer at the end of grade 8 I was free. She wanted to take him back, so I ran away. I packed my things and took the bus to my grandparent's house and said I would not go back if she lived with him.

I have many stories of this but the gist of it is she never did a thing to defend me from him even though it was obvious that he was a child abuser, and she was also by proxy.

It took a year of therapy to make me realize just how abnormal that was, I though that every family functioned this way for a very long time, the therapy was a decade ago.

I went to go see her over the holiday in the nice apartment she is living in she inherited from her parents, and I thought to myself you have never actually had a job even when I left home at 19, you have never payed your own rent, and here you are preaching to me how to raise my teenage daughter like some sort of expert. It is impossible to discuss any of this with her or it turns into a gaslighting bait and switch festival of cognitive dissonance on her part. I have offered to go to therapy with her and she has refused.

I am too old for this shit, I have a business to run and daughter to raise.

I am cutting off contact with her, every time I go for a visit the whole situation triggers me and I simply can't take it anymore.

I also worry about my daughter when she goes for a sleepover at her grandma's, but this is most likely paranoia at this point. I am not posting this from a throwaway because I don't give a shit really.