Choosing to go No Contact was surprisingly easy. My NM had found herself in trouble with the law in late 2010 and, being unenlightened at the time, I leaped to the rescue. With hindsight, receiving a call from NM asking me to go to her house, 3 months pregnant on a 40C day to climb an 8 foot corrugated iron fence to feed her pets because she had been imprisoned on a string of charges should have made me think a little. But no. being the "good" daughter I am, I went to her house, fed her pets, tried not to vomit at the state of the place, got her new hot water system installed, and arranged her bail.
One of her bail conditions was that she lived with me and my family. That did not go well. She insisted upon sleeping in our pool room, and refused to come into the house. She used our back yard as a toilet, and then insisted it was our young children doing it. She took the kids to the park: they would come home telling us about the various ways Grandma was going to be dead or never coming back to make everyone sad. She told our then 3 year old to go and stand in a nearby busy road and get squashed by a truck, because Mummy and Daddy would be happier without her. She threw our two year old son through a door. We refused to have her dog with us: she brought it anyway, and it kept attacking the children. Unmitigated disaster.
Eventually the dog bit the children once too often and we told her the dog had to go. Naturally, she had a temper tantrum, and proceeded to scream at the three year old (who had just had the dog try and bite her face off) that she was never going to see her again, it was all her fault, etc etc. NM and her dog were gone within the hour.
Several weeks later, we had cause to drop in on her. I telephoned first. She told us to come by. NM was extremely drunk, which was in breach of bail conditions, and in the mood to torture someone. She choose me, and decided to get at me by using the children. Anyone with a NM knows how that goes. So, I packed the kids and drove away, as she screamed abuse down the road at me. Standard stuff "you'll never see me again. You need to apologise for speaking to me like that. You're pushing me away. Your children will suffer without me." etc etc. All because I refused an offer of coffee because she was drunk, and I had repeatedly told her that I would not tolerate drunkenness around the children.
The last words I heard were "never contact me again". So I reported her for breach of bail, got myself removed as her guarantor, and proceeded to never contact her again. Three days later, while sitting in hospital myself having some prenatal tests done, I got a call from the local hospital: she had been admitted under police guard. I couldn't bring myself to care a lot. She chose to drink, she chose to be rude, she chose to be abusive, if she didn't like the consequences, that was her problem.
Fast forward to August 2011. NM appears on the doorstep like nothing had happened. In the few months break, I had thought of her occasionally, but only when fielding her debtors. Turns out she had been providing my phone number as hers when signing up for services, like home phone, internet, her dog registration, utilities bills... No apology, no acknowledgement that anything vaguely untoward had happened, absolutely nothing. I know now that this a common technique among N's, but it had always been something that baffled me. We had a new baby by then, so she gave us her "new" phone numbers, that she had changed to prevent us calling her, in case we needed her help. This is the woman who refused to touch her second grandchild until he was 6 months old because he was male.
Needless to say, we have never dialled the numbers.
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