I don’t know if this is the best place to post.
My daughters, 18 and 15, are adopted. Both have lots of issues and the oldest in particular has always been very angry.
She binge drinks and is a very unpleasant drunk, with verbal abuse, foul language, physical aggression and smashing up the house.
In the last few weeks she’s kicked and punched me, and then on Saturday she threw a heavy book hard at me, the corner of which caught me just above my eye. I was ok apart from a red, sore mark but I could have been blinded.
She was screaming abuse at me and bits of saliva were coming out of her mouth - she was literally spitting with rage. She kicked the front door repeatedly and threatened to kill me so I rang 999.
One of the police who came asked how likely I thought it on a scale of 1-10 that she’d seriously hurt me one day and I said seven or eight. She is small and I’m quite a big woman but I’m not getting any younger - early 50s - and she just doesn’t hold back at all, but loses all control. I am pretty sure that if there happened to be a kitchen knife lying around when she was in one of these rages she wouldn’t hesitate to use it. One of our cats is terrified of her and hides away from her.
I’m usually the target of her anger and it’s usually when she’s drunk but she also kicked off in a shop the other day because they refused to sell her an energy drink, and she came home one night boasting about how she’d beaten up a girl on a bus, and she wasn’t drunk on those occasions. I don’t think she’s into drugs, because she saw what drugs did to her birth mother.
Anyway, in the past she’s been charged several times with assaulting me but this time the police didn’t seem to want to arrest her - understandable given how busy they are at the moment - and took her to a friend’s. She’s now been found somewhere to live a few miles away by the council homeless team.
That’s the background and finally I’ve got to the bit I need advice on. The police put me in touch with a domestic abuse organisation who can help me get an injunction to prevent her harassing me, coming to the house etc. But I would like, in future when things have calmed down, to be able to meet her somewhere public for a coffee or a meal. The woman I spoke to said that was an unusual request as it was usual for there to be no contact between the parties (who are of course usually partners and not mother and daughter) and I’d have to ask the judge.
I’m now wondering if I’m doing the right thing. It’s a huge deal to cut your 18-year-old daughter out of your life. Perhaps it would be better if I warned her that I won’t get the injunction this time, but that I want her to stay away from our home and if she won’t, I’ll then have no choice.
She’s not a monster - the other day she cut my lawn and my elderly mom’s lawn without being asked. She’s had some awful experiences and gone through a lot. But I can’t keep on being her punchbag.
And she won’t get help for her anger or binge drinking. She went to Camhs when she was younger and saw a counsellor last year but won’t really engage.