I have a twenty month old son and am due another baby in November. I haven't seen my mother in nearly a year - I've told her she's not welcome to visit us until she acknowledges and confronts her mental health problems / changes her behaviour. So basically I'm 'denying access' to her grandchildren.
My reasons are many; I posted a thread when DS was 11 weeks old that contains some of them. Her behaviour has always been odd and unpredictable, she has an unaddressed paranoid personality disorder which dictates most of it. When I was a child she was extremely loving and nurturing (hence my feelings of doubt and guilt now) but there was a lot of instability - periods of homelessness (actual roaming of the streets and living in tents etc when I was six); constant moving around, taking me out of school; lots of changing of names; lies about my paternity. We were always on the run from something. I admit I carry resentment about a lot of this (in particular the dad thing), but had never intended to let any of it interfere with her relationship with her grandchildren.
It's the continuing low level mad and unwelcome behaviour that has led to me pulling up the drawbridge. She got worse when DS was born (see previous thread), and I suppose I still feel pretty personally pissed off by how much she let me down since I became a mother - I could have done with some support and instead got unhinged behaviour, vanadlised mail, laptops in the bath, and then just a long and dreary refusal to acknowledge any of it, or take steps to change, despite my pleading. I think becoming a parent myself has made me far, far less tolerant of her behaviour too. Situations I previously would have considered my duty to manage for her soon came to appear ridiculous. Our last meeting ended in a row in a car park about private detectives (with me holding DS throughout - a ground rule I'd attempted to lay down was no discussions of the paranoid stuff in front of him), after which I put her on a train home. Instead of going home she went to live in Victoria bus station for a few nights before ringing my husband to ask for her bus fare the rest of the way. Her casual way of normalising this sort of behaviour is amazing and always makes me doubt myself a bit - I'm often left thinking that perhaps I'm overreacting and that going to stay in bus stations is actually a perfectly valid detour (she said she as 'people watching'). All of her visits have involved me treading on eggshells, being pounced on with accusations of conspiracy against her, and just bucketloads of tension; and she'd wander the house a fair bit at night, which drove me particularly nuts because I would be up half the night myself feeding DS, and it was very distracting and unsettling. She also has a lot of pseudonyms/aliases and doesn't like it when anyone questions this. They are 'precautions'. I'm not able to write to my grandmother for any reason, as she intercepts her mail. I'm however continually suspected of conspiring against her in this way (which is how she justifies reading any letters). I don't think my last birthday or Christmas cards to my grandmother got through my mother's firewall.
She's never offered any practical or real emotional help to me in my adult life, apart from for a few weeks after my c section with DS when she stayed and helped with the laundry. She had a selfish reaction to my wedding announcement (also the wedding itself), wasn't really interested in my PhD while I was doing it or once I got it (when she asked if I ever wondered what the point of it was), I didn't go to any of my graduations because I had no parent to invite, and she helped to derail my early career in London by turning up homeless on my doorstep and expecting me to house her in my sublet room, then disappearing onto the streets when I couldn't. She was missing for many months before turning up at her mother's, where she has lived ever since (13 years or so). She's never held down a job or had any friends or a partner, all because of the mental health issues she refuses to acknowledge. She is entitled to a state pension now, but isn't claiming it, because of paranoia issues.
Occasionally she asks to visit. Occasionally she says I'm blackmailing her. I'm mostly NC with her, have blocked her number, but I did write to say I'm pregnant again. The very sporadic contact I do make with her always consistently asks her to consider putting us first and see a Doctor so that we can be a family. I say that the door is open if she can just take that first step. She calls these 'nasty letters' and says it's blackmail.
AIBU? I don't think she's aware that she could pursue this matter of access legally, but what would a court say, I wonder?
One additional factor is that I can't physically be around her now, the thought makes me feel very sick and anxious. So contact with her grandchildren would have to be without be there, with my husband. I'm obviously keen to protect them from any unpleasantness and confusion, and to me that means no contact with her.
Long post, extra fries to all those who got through it 