The thing is, I'm very happy with what I've got at the moment, my life is wonderful now that she's out of the picture, the only spanner in the works is that I won't deny my children a relationship with her, therefore I have to have contact with her....my therapist always pushed me not to let my children see her either so that I could truly cut contact, but I can't do that, they have to make up their minds about her themselves, because their relationship with her is on a different level to mine. And I do understand what my therapist means, what her motives are, that it hits me so hard when my mother does contact me to see the girls - fear, adrenalin, anxiety etc, that it would be far healthier for me if that didn't have to happen.

And I suppose my feelings are particularly strong at the moment, because I am starting to deal with stuff, that I guess has been too painful to deal with in the past because it's something I always skirted around or glossed over, and that is the abuse I suffered at the hands of my sister, and it's not even the things she did, sexualised aggression, burning me, heavy violence - it's the fact that I went to my mum on several occasions with the cuts and bruises and burns, and cried at her to make my sister stop, and she was always very dismissive and never did anything to help me or protect me, but the day I tried to push my sister off me during one of those sexualised episodes and accidentally scratched her chest, I knew about it, I was severely punished, for daring to put a mark on my sister.

And when I see my mother to drop the girls off, I see someone old beyond their years, she's in her early 60's but seems about 70, I feel sorry for her, I think "well she did her best", and I want to offer her some kind of care, but when I'm forced to look at other stuff and I look at my children and try to imagine doing those things or allowing other people to do those things to my children, I'm still angry in parts, and feel like she doesn't deserve my care.

And I dont know whether I will ever be able to reconcile those two things