Would I let my figurative child spend time with his/her grandparents?

I learned from my sister yesterday, as she was driving me home, that my mother will be looking after my 2 1/2 month old nephew soon, when my sister-in-law goes back to work one day a week.  She will do this for the next three months.   After that time, I believe that my brother’s son, who will then be six months, will go to daycare Monday to Friday when his mother goes back to work full-time.  Actually, my sister-in-law will not physically GO back to work as works from a home office but still you cannot work full time and take care of an infant at the same time.

When my sister told me this, it had a profoundly negative affect immediately on my mood.  I felt sick and profoundly sad.

I have been thinking about it since last night so this is my attempt to sort out my feelings.

Immediately, upon hearing the news, I felt physically sick at the thought that a woman who almost burned me with a kettle and who was so abusive to me for a lifetime could be left alone with a fragile 2 1/2 month old baby.  It was a profoundly scary thought to me.

Today, I have realized that it is only scary to me.  Here is why.

For whatever reason my mother chose me as the target of her rage when I was a very young girl; my earliest memory occurred at age nine.  My brothers and sister were the good children and I was the useless, worthless, stupid, defective, disgusting, irrational…animal or monster.

How my siblings feel about my mother is based on how they have been treated by her.  My siblings were not abused, so logically, understandably, they feel differently about my parents.

I have at times wondered about whether I could leave a would be child of mine in the care of my parents.  My first instinct years ago was never!  Then at  some point, I considered whether it was unfair of me to consider denying a child a relationship with his/her grandparents?   I decided that in theory it was unfair. 

But now that I am no longer living with the abuse and am slowly getting some distance from it, I now realize the following:

• That I believe that my mother would engage it the same psychological process that allowed her to chose from among her children and to abuse me, with any my child of mine as well.  I believe she would see him/her as an extension of me and find a way to justify it in that instance as well.  Why couldn’t she justify it twice?
• That my father, if my mother was present, would fail to protect my child, if my mother deemed him/her unworthy just as he failed to protect me.  My greatest fear in that situation is that he would repeat the sick dance (that is what I call him physically abusing me in response to my mother’s demonizing of me) and reinforce my mother’s pathology with my child as he reinforced her pathology with me.
• That if my mother was 100% GUARANTEED to NOT be there, that my father could likely be trusted not to physically abuse my child.

I do not know my baby brother’s mother.  I have never met her.  Given that she dotes on my baby brother, I assume that she will dote on his son.  I do not have to worry about my precious nephew as my mother did not abuse his father so why would she abuse his son? 

I am free of them enough now to know unequivocally that I would NEVER leave my mother alone with a child of mine.   That would be endangering my child to a high probability of abuse.  I would be failing my child….consciously. 

Elina Grace Edwin