I think this was actually the last time that Bub came up to my mother while she was alive.

I gave her several chances (more likely nearly actually pled with her, if not outright did so) to apologize to my son for her treatment of him, and she refused to do so each and every time. I know that it had to have been more than ten. But the one that burned me up the most was the last time that he happened to be near her, after I had fed her one of her meals. I asked her to apologize to him for her treatment of him while he was sitting right there, hoping that him being in close proximity to her might encourage — or even incentivize — her to do so. And I made sure never to word any of my requests in a manner that “placed blame” on her, not wanting to push her further away from doing this than simply making the request might, actually wanting her to apologize to him at some point while she was still alive, figuring that we were at the point that she might not have that much longer left if she needed help to get to the bathroom from the bed and back, in and out of the car, and someone to help her eat puréed foods because she could not swallow anything thicker than that (and she was starting to have difficulties with those, which meant feeding her took time).

But no. She blows all of that up by verbalizing the word “no”, right in front of him, as he is sitting there.

Even though Bub has severe communicative delays, I presume competence. I don’t assume that he can not or does not understand something unless that has been conveyed to me. So it was at this point that I decide to stop asking her to apologize to Bub for what she has done to, and said about, him, because she has made it abundantly clear that she is never going to — I feel as though it is a waste of time on my part to continue to ask, and if she ever suddenly changes her mind, she can make that clear to me on her own time. But at this point, I’m put in a position. I have to choose between my child and my mother. Something’s got to give.

I’m put in the screwed up position of having to choose between the person that gave birth to me and the person that I gave birth to, because one of them is forcing my hand and through her own deliberate actions continually making this the situation that it has become. And as much as it would not have been a decision that I would have wanted to make in the first place, I do not falter. To this day, I know that I would have made the same exact decision, and I would have done things the same exact way if given another chance.

I tell my mother that she is no longer my mother and that she will remain this way until she apologizes to my child. I am her caregiver, and I will remain her caregiver until she passes away. But I am no longer her child.

If her opinion of my child is so low that he is not worth apologizing to, I am not worth having as a child.

Based on the look on her face as I said this to her, she understood every word that I said and she didn’t care.

Some of you will understand the subject of this post as I continue to make these posts and you keep reading.

As my mother continued to need more help ambulating, such as getting up from the bed to use the restroom, Bub would occasionally see me assist her. In my eyes, the straw that broke the camel’s back in that it actually got my mother told that she was no longer allowed to talk to that child of mine (for what would become the rest of her life) was him coming into the room and getting up on her bed while I had her in the restroom. I would have asked him to leave the room, or walked away from her long enough to get him to leave the room, if I could have walked away from her long enough to do so, but at that time I could not. She decided to shout at him as I was assisting her, to the point that I could see spit fly out from her mouth and the veins bulge in her neck, that he was — and I’m just going to quote her on this — a “broken, retarded piece of shit”. I could see him react to this, even though his communicative delay meant that he might not have understood the meaning of those words. But there was the intent, and there was the tone. (Some of the people who wonder why I continue to refuse to forgive her to this day speculate that she might have done this “because she had a brain tumor removed”, “because she was undergoing cancer treatment”, or “because she was losing her mind at the end,” quite likely having developed dementia toward the end of it. To me, there was absolutely no excuse at the end of any of it to make it clear that she did not like one child of mine while continuing to treat the other child like nothing at all had changed, and someone should have held her as accountable as she could have been held during periods of lucidity. My job was protecting my child.)

Needless to say, we had an extremely long conversation about this after I had confirmed that she continued to be in a period of lucidity. I was completely civil during this conversation, but I was not polite. She was told that she was no longer allowed to talk to that child of mine, bar one incident that I will later write about. I made sure that she heard, and understood, every word that I had to say. She did not appear to like being held accountable for this, but I made sure that she was, and I made sure that she would be keeping her mouth shut about however she felt about this child of mine whenever he might inadvertently have been around her or within earshot of her from that point forward. And, from that point on, she did exactly that.

It would be the last time that she ever said anything insulting about my child where he could hear it.

I made sure that Bub knew, with the words that came out of my mouth, with my tone, and with my intent, that he was absolutely none of those things. That he would never be any of those things, and that was final.

From that point on, it seemed as though he believed me and trusted me a lot more than he trusted Grandma.

I was glad for this, and I was thankful for this, because it would make the coming months easier to deal with.