Hi, OP here. Please see these words as being open and genuine, because they are posted in that spirit.
Thanks for apologizing to my wife, first off. It’s not easy to apologize to a stranger. I can see that you already acknowledged that perhaps the words containing thoughts of violence towards me weren’t appreciated. Thanks for that as well.
A couple things I might add for clarity’s sake; which I didn’t add at the time, because this was a rant on a memory that’s several years old now, and I didn’t think to add them at the time:
When this happened, my wife and I were still doing our best to have a relationship with her family. We didn’t yet realize fully how bad the situation was, we were still in it. We were young, and had a lot to learn; and have since done so. You’re placing angry and harsh judgment on the person that I was almost 7 years ago. Perhaps I should have better indicated the age of this reflection.
I asked my mother to apologize because she was the stronger and bigger person, and also because she had done wrong as well, even if not as badly. I’m a firm believer that we lead and teach by example, and my hope had been that by taking the high road and having my mom apologize, we would have been able to teach some humility and create an open dialogue to resolve things. It didn’t work out how my young head had envisioned, but you have to realize that I was caught up in the moment and trying to do what I could with what tools I had, in order to try and make peace and still be able to get married the following day without even more damage control being needed. Looking back with what I know and have learned since, things would not be the same.
A crucial piece that you are missing, and that I didn’t include in this post as I have both learned and developed new strategies to live with this AND I didn’t feel it needed to be included as this is a subreddit supporting victims of abuse.. at that time I was living with a VERY freshly diagnosed mental illness. One that made it hard for me to openly confront people, and impacted me in other ways as well. It was not an easy thing to suddenly find myself needing to try and pull everything back together so that we could have a wedding, when at the time I didn’t have all of the tools necessary to do a very good job of that. I did what I thought was right in the moment; or at least, I did what I thought I had control over. I didn’t know what had just happened as far as that confrontation between my SIL and mom was concerned; I was in a completely different building on a set of grounds that is almost 15 acres. All I saw was the aftermath- which was yelling and screaming and crying. I was trying to do damage control of what I saw done spilling into the rehearsal space. Looking back now, with the tools I’ve learned, and from a healthier, abuse free state of mind, I would like to think I would make different choices. I’ve learned a lot about how to live with my mental illness, and that has also changed how I act and approach life. I’d like to think adult me would act and behave differently than what I consider to have been “kid me” 7 years ago.
Anyways. I hope you read this knowing that I mean no disrespect towards you, or any negativity at all. I just wanted to give you a reply to your comments, and to also give you more details that perhaps would have been helpful knowledge. Also, I wasn’t about to take what you said to me and shy away from it- instead, I wanted to talk about it. And I think that might have been part of the point you were aiming to get across- that shying away from a conversation doesn’t help.
I’m not sure what time it is where you are, but I hope your day is excellent! :)