Maybe no one brought it up to you because no one believed it?
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It is hard from the distance to know that your mother-in-law was branding you a child-abuser.
I think it is possible that she thought she saw what she claimed. A mistaken eyewitness is often convinced of what she "saw."
And child abuse is a pattern, not an outlier. A parent might slap a child in a loss of control, but if it doesn't recur or follow a pattern, I'd never label a parent as a child abuser. Losing a temper once doesn't make the parent an abuser. Getting drunk once doesn't make a person an alcoholic.
The term is too often misused. Not saying that it was in your mother-in-law's case, but it is very difficult to assess the validity of this in such a limited reveal.
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I'm not dismissing your feelings in any way, but she had antipathy for you. Not sure why the particulars are so rankling.
An enemy can do no good. A friend can do no wrong.
You know you aren't an abuser. Your kid and wife know. Their words should be the standard for your wife's family. Maybe you're concerned that your gay side is going to give them reason to inflate anything else?
Speaking of profiling, do you think any of this is culturally based (i.e. are you "guilty" to them in part because you are a black man who has come out)?
As for abuse, you could have knocked someone backward out of a chair and not been an abuser, only someone who had a violent outburst. Abusers are habitual, just like addicts.
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i wouldn't have seen abuse in this scenario either. i agree with Hardheaded, abuse is a pattern, not a once- or twice-occurring incident.
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I see what all of you are saying about abuse, in my mind if a man hits a woman or a child in a fighting fashion,
I ask "if he does that in front of others, what goes on behind closed doors?".
I have in times past confronted people and intervened by both warning and letting them know that I would be watching.
If I saw a relative hit his son in the gut , we would have a talk, if he blew me off the police would hear from me.
I have zero tolerance for the "one time thing" aspect, if I saw it, I feel a responsibility to stop it.
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The most important is what your son think about this and if this is affecting your relationship with him, at the end your wife's family can think whatever they want but it is your son and you what it counts.
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You should have left all this in the past...
There's nothing you can do about it but let it eat at you from the inside which if it's bothering after "several years" + a "few years".... you're hurting yourself by letting it still bother you.
It's not healthy and if you can't get over it, seek help.
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