A shout out to all the amazing mothers who parent through abuse. It’s hard – being abused reduces your capacity (your energy, your time, your confidence) and it makes you face impossible choices. How do you keep a family safe when staying in the relationship and leaving it are both dangerous? How do you make the best choices for your children when you are constantly undermined, are forced to leave homes, jobs, friends? How do you keep smiling, playing, helping with homework, answering those difficult questions, just being ‘mum’, 24-7, when you have been isolated from your support network and you’re frightened and lonely and tired?
Abusive partners use your children, your relationship with them and your hopes & aspirations as a tactic of abuse. And you keep going in a society that defaults to blaming the victim – asking how mums are keeping their children safe and not a perpetrator is putting them in danger.
So, here’s to the mums coping with abuse now, the mums coping with the effects of past abuse, the mums who feel like they’re not coping, to the mums whose children aren’t with them at the moment, the mums who’ve miscarried, who’ve gone without, who’ve felt blamed and responsible. To the mums no longer with us. #MothersDay #ShoutOut #parenting&abuse