Dear Prudence,
I was emotionally abused by my mom growing up. She was a failed novelist but found some notoriety by writing a mommy blog back in the day. My entire life from the time I was a toddler until a teenager out of the house was fodder for her adoring fans, and I was completely exposed and didn’t have any privacy. It was a life of humiliation when I got to middle school because despite the fake name, people knew who my mom was. Try sitting next to the boy you have a crush on and knowing that when you got your first period was published online. I developed an eating disorder when I was in high school, and my mom decided she was going to be a crusader for the cause. She ate up the attention and never gave a thought to what it cost me. No matter how I begged, she needed to share her “truth.”
I went to college on the opposite coast and never have been home. I rarely call and only respond to texts now and again. My mother will not hear about the hurt she caused me, and my father just enables her. Only now, my mother has a cancer diagnosis and is begging me to reconcile, and she is back at blogging about her cancer journey. I know she will not respect any request for her to leave me out of it, but the thought of potentially losing my mother makes me sick. What do I do here?
—Not Another Blog