How do I outgrow her trauma?

This is part 2 of a series, find all parts here.

Louisa invited me to her baby shower as a peace offering. Perhaps feeling guilty for all the pain she’d put me through over the last six months, perhaps to shut my mother up, perhaps as a trick.

But she didn’t really want me to come. And I had a feeling about this at the time. She thought that there was no way we’d be able to travel to her country with all of the tiny things. But we did it. And suddenly, after weeks of logistical bedlam and legal approvals, she decides that babies are no longer allowed at the shower.

How do I put into words the fury? I can’t. So instead, my nervous system boils up until it bubbles over. And I’m crying in the car through slices of smoked cheese and my husbands well-meaning ‘Why bother even going if she’s going to treat you like this?’.

‘Because she’s a bully!’ I choke through sobs. ‘And you have to stand up to bullies!’

I wish it was as easy as just cutting her out. Actually, I wish it was easy to cut my whole family out. But it isn’t. I have tried. There are too many group chats and weddings and people who are interlocked that are innocent – her husband being one of them, who I consider a dear friend.

But she has poisoned them all with a picture of me that isn’t true.

Five years ago, after four years of sobriety, I relapsed, badly, after my husband said he wasn’t sure about having children. (Don’t worry, that all worked out, and he now can’t see a life without them and wants more lol, it was a complete waste of alcohol). I rang my sister, after another rocky year of in’s and out’s and on’s and off’s with her. Slurring my words, she pushed me away and away and away. And all I said, for twenty minutes, was:

‘I should have protected you’

‘I should have protected you’

‘I should have protected you’

*As we have since established, it actually wasn’t my job to protect another child from a predator when I too was a child being abused by a predator, and the only reason I think I am supposed to carry that guilt is because she made me feel like I should*. (See part 1.)

I then, in one inebriated minute, made my life hell for the next five years:

‘Please stop pushing me away Louisa. Please put your wall down. I know I’m a lot and I know I keep asking you this, but when I was a kid, I had this dream that you would die when you are 35 and I’m so scared that it will come true and I just want us to connect again like we used to.’

And that was it. Within days, Louisa had seeped into the veins of everyone who cared for me, telling them that I had ‘wished her dead’ and that no one should come near me. And it’s never been the same since. She refused to have any further conversations with me about it (until recently, part 1, where she told me she couldn’t care less about me, so it’s clearly going well). And I am totally and utterly exhausted with it all.

I don’t have a solution for all of this. I just know that I’m really hitting my limit with how much more of this belittling and bullying and lying and manipulating and gaslighting I can take.

How do I outgrow this teacher?